Why Is Grandma Naked?: Caring for Your Aging Parent - Paperback

by Ellen Pober Rittberg (Author)

In this humorous self-help book, award-winning journalist and attorney Ellen Pober Rittberg serves as a guide and cheerleader to family members who undertake to care for their elderly parents.

Sharing the stresses and satisfactions when caring for her aging mother, Rittberg uses comical chapter headings such as:

• Be The Alpha Dog
• Boundaries? Huh? Your Aging Parent Has None
• Your Parent May Develop Sticky Fingers
• JEOPARDY! (why elderly parents need their favorite show even when they can't answer any of the questions)

Rittberg employs an upbeat breezy, can-do tone. She details common scenarios and techniques she used when caring for her aging parent at home, such as:

• Toilet training your senior parents using the "rump on the hump" technique when incontinence is an issue
• Taking away car keys before reading about a parent in a newspaper crime blotter
• Their hobby of digging deep into their nostrils and other recesses
• Staying awake while hearing the nineteenth retelling of childhood stories from your parent with dementia
• Playing matchmaker to hired caregivers
• Avoiding shopping trips turning into shoplifting trips
• Understanding declining parents' sometimes hilarious fantasies and delusions.

Rittberg shares with readers the life-changing, humbling and deeply rewarding benefits of caring for elderly parents and knows a good belly laugh is the best stress reliever.