How to get through to your aging parents without arguing
'You don’t want to rub their nose into their incapacity.'. DepositPhotos This article was originally featured on KFF Health News. It was a regrettable mistake. But Kim Sylvester thought she was doing the right thing at the time. Her 80-year-old mother, Harriet Burkel, had fallen at her home in Raleigh, North Carolina, fractured her pelvis, and gone to a rehabilitation center to recover. It was only days after the death of Burkel’s 82-year-old husband, who’d moved into a memory care facility three years before. With growing distress, Sylvester had watched her mother, who had emphysema and peripheral artery disease, become increasingly frail and isolated. “I would say, ‘Can I help you?’ And my mother would say, ‘No, I can do this myself. I don’t need anything. I can handle it,’” Sylvester told me. Now, Sylvester had...