![]() And, there’s lots of reasons people don’t want to disclose that. For anybody covering this, the necessity of keeping things short and tight may mean that you’re presenting someone at their most frail. It’s really important to represent someone’s activities, life’s achievements before we talk about their limitations and their complications. What advice do you have for journalists when speaking with family caregivers or people experiencing cognitive decline? You cover this issue with caring and sensitivity. Unlike when you’re a young parent, we don’t see caring as day-to-day life. Most people are doing caregiving at home or in institutions. Aging itself and caring are starting to appear in popular culture, probably because there are more boomers at the helm of studios and publishing firms that can say, “Yes, we’re going to put that out.” Why are so invisible? It’s not something people want to make a movie about. The third season has been about where we are in culture. Which is why I like how some of the social media people are doing it more colorfully or positively. It has been a little challenging to figure out how to find not a phony hope or a smarmy thing. I don’t want to listen to 20 minutes of a downer story. How do you balance discussing these serious issues with providing some spark of hope or empathy for other caregivers who are listening? But I think that was a great way of bringing visibility to what many of us are doing but the rest of the world doesn’t know it. One thing that’s been wonderful is younger people doing very short diaries with the elders they’re caring for on Tik Tok and Instagram. Is it difficult to get them to open up?įor each interview, I tried to find an element of what someone was going through or had learned or was confronting so that each episode is slightly different. ![]() Now it’s finding other peoples’ stories so we can really make this a visible activity because right now it’s invisible. That somehow was going to be a bit of comfort to me - that I could get control over the situation by shaping it. It was a process of thinking it through and writing it down and trying to shape it and then put it out in any way that I could wrestle while I was taking care of him and working. How does telling these stories on your podcast help you cope with your own journey and subsequent loss? And then I found somebody who designed a razor specifically so that you could give someone a shave away from a sink or water. My sister and I were trying and it was a mess. In one of the early episodes, I talked about having to give him a shave when he was in the hospital. Then, I started calling people for help because there were all these elements that I was having trouble even articulating. It wasn’t like I went out as a radio reporter and put a mic in his lap, but I thought I might as well tape some of this. Initially, I just started taking notes on my cell phone. I didn’t understand how to care for my dad. What do you hope to achieve through your storytelling?įirst and foremost, doing a first-person story about this, I felt like I could find other people and not feel so alone. ![]() ![]() This conversation with has been edited for clarity and brevity. In this “How I did It,” you’ll learn more about Eisele’s storytelling process for her podcast. Eisele created the Twenty-Four Seven podcast, now in its third season, which explores living, dying and what our loved ones mean to us. ![]() So, she did what any good journalist would do. When longtime NPR journalist Kitty Eisele became a full-time caregiver for her dad, she found herself unprepared for the medical, legal and emotional challenges of elder care. ![]()
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