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"Homeward Bound" Addresses the End of Life
Ziettlow Sees Work Get Published
Starting with the Obituaries
I recently came across a great piece of Estates and Trusts scholarship: "Making Things Fair": An Empirical Study of How People Approach the Wealth Transmission System, by Naomi Cahn and Amy Ziettlow. I was hooked as soon as I read that Cahn and Ziettlow began their data collection by reading every o...
The Honor Commandment: Law, Religion and the Challenge of Elder Care
As a religious law, adage, and recipe for generational reciprocity, the "honor commandment" looms large as a societal construct, especially with 76 million baby boomers in the United States approaching old age. This article explores how the honor commandment persists as a normative ethic in the live...
Is Divorce the Best Option for Older Americans?
We are divorcing well enough on our own, we do not need our social safety net encouraging divorce as the only viable option for protecting a family's nest egg. We need policies that reward and support privately provided care, which is cheaper for society to boot, that explicitly honors the marriages...
Making Things Fair after a Parent's Death
Everyone dies. But what happens to everything that they leave, their earthly possessions? Deciding who gets what is easier when there's a will or some other record of what the decedent wanted. Regardless of how much formal planning was ever completed, however, the process of distributing prized (or...
Making Things Fair: An Empirical Study of How People Approach the Wealth Transmission System
The wealth transmission process is of great concern to many senior citizens in the United States. The American wealth transmission process is designed to respect private ordering. It encourages planning as a means to formalize intent and ensure smoother property transfer at death. Most people do not...
When an Imprisoned Parent Isn't Home for the Holidays
The word “home” remains one of the most evocative in the English language, especially in lyric form during the month of December. Countless singers croon of coming home or being home for the holidays, but for many families, including 2.7 million children—that’s one in 28 American kids—an i...
Managing the Costs of Family Elder Care
November marks National Caregiving Month. Having served for many years as a hospice chaplain and COO, I have seen first hand the power of home-based, family-centered caregiving. However, for all its strengths, providing care to a seriously ill adult as an informal, uncompensated, family caregiver ca...
Stepfamily relationships affect elder caregiving plans
Will Steps Step Up to the Challenge of Elder Care?
Last month the Institute of Medicine released a dense and edifying report on the current and future state of end of life care, Dying in America. Overall, the esteemed, interdisciplinary authors stressed the importance of treating the patient as part of a broader family system and not as an isolated,...
The Sacred Work of Community Memorial Services
For many years, I served as a hospice chaplain. Although I am deeply shaped by my Lutheran faith, I understood my role as a chaplain to be a part of our society's expression of civil religion where I provided ecumenical resources for the dying and their loved ones and served as a non-anxious presenc...
Meet the sandwich generation caring for aging parents and young children simultaneously
The Club Sandwich Generation
The Club Sandwich Generation
September is National Grandparent's Month. A perfect time to raise awareness of the club sandwich generation: those caught in the middle of a multi-layered caregiving existence. Chloe* is a good example. She's thirty-seven years old, married, and a mother to two young children. She spent the last y...
Women, Eldercare, and the Honor Commandment
In the Biblical story of Ruth, the burden of honoring and caring for Naomi falls to Ruth, her daughter-in-law. Naomi's husband and sons have died, but Ruth promises, "where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your friends will be my friends and your God will be my God."Thousands of yea...
Remembering Katrina and Surviving the Loss of Everything
Every autumn my memories go back to 2005 in south Louisiana when Hurricane Katrina and the aftermath of the breached levees redefined home for so many people in New Orleans as well as the surrounding communities like Baton Rouge where our family lived. Not only human life but property and personal p...
Death, Modern Families and the Saga of Casey Kasem
This summer I've been following the dissonant end of life story of Casey Kasem. The family dynamics of his story caught my eye because I research the moral and spiritual lives of caregivers and grievers. I pay close attention to how the dynamics of blended families shape our stories of nurturing, dy...
3 Reasons Clergy Need a Healthcare Planning App
Alice,* a member of my congregation, was 76 years old and in good health when she asked me to serve as her healthcare agent, the person who will make medical decisions for her should she be unable to do so for herself. Widowed and living alone, she had no grown children, although a niece lived in a ...
3 Reasons Clergy Need a Healthcare Planning App
Alice,* a member of my congregation, was 76 years old and in good health when she asked me to serve as her healthcare agent, the person who will make medical decisions for her should she be unable to do so for herself. Widowed and living alone, she had no grown children, although a niece lived in a ...