Help Keep the Newsletter Strong

Hello, caregiver, and thank you for being a vital part of this Newsletter community.

Every week, we come together through this newsletter—not just to share tips or insights, but to remind one another that no one is walking this path alone. These stories, these moments of connection, are born from love, experience, and the quiet strength so many of you show each day.

I write these words as both a guide and a fellow traveler, knowing how heavy caregiving can feel—especially during the holidays and into the new year. This newsletter doesn’t bring in income; in fact, it costs me each week to keep it going. But I do it because your responses tell me it helps—sometimes in ways I never expected.

If you’ve ever found comfort, clarity, or just a moment of peace in these pages, would you consider helping us keep this space alive? A gift of $5, $10, or whatever feels right to you makes a real difference. It’s not just support for the newsletter—it’s a vote for the community we’re building together.

[Support the Newsletter – It Only Takes a Moment]

Thank you for being part of this family. Your presence—and your care—means more than words can say.

Caregiver’s Corner: You Don’t Find Gratitude in the Moment—You Find the Moment Through Gratitude

Alzheimer’s disease is a difficult place to look to for comfort. How can we possibly pull contentment, even gratitude, from such a terrible situation? That a question I’ve put to myself many times over the last year.

In January of 2025, my mom made the move to memory care. As most of my readers probably understand all too well, watching her struggle through these moments has pulled at all of the frayed edges of my heart.

I’ve had to force gratitude out on the stage, front and center. The funny thing is, once I found one thing to be grateful for, I found more. There were plenty of things to feel badly about: I’m sure everyone gets that. But when I just started finding the smallest things to be grateful for, I kept finding larger and larger things.

This led to the most precious discovery: I heard my mom play piano, really play piano, for the first time. My mother was a classically trained musician who graduated from a prestigious school of music. My father was a minister and every Sunday she would bang out the tunes on the piano so the congregation could sing along. That’s what I knew, what I had heard my whole life. I didn’t understand…

As the dementia has advanced, it seems to have set my mom free to play, and I mean truly play. When she sits down at the piano now, she is free from both the constraints of being the “preacher’s wife” and free from the childhood admonitions to be humble and not draw attention to one’s self.

Now she’s taking songs I’ve heard my whole life and weaving them together into a tapestry, riffing new harmonies, and turning the music of my youth into a catalog of music made new again. The effortless ease with which she performs all of these “new” musical magic tricks is honestly inspiring. I am so, so grateful that my mom is playing for me for real now. I had no idea.

My gratitude for this has allowed me to see other things to be grateful for, other ways our relationship has opened up. It’s a bit like meeting a whole new side of my mother that wasn’t available before.

To me, holidays are about gratitude and service. They’re built into our year to give us a moment where we can stop and be thankful for the gifts we have, however small. I see these days as a chance to reset and refocus on not just what I have but how I want to give back to the world.

We have the rest of the year to look at the problems, the struggles, and the grief. This holiday season, I hope you can cast your eyes—and your heart—in a different direction and find compassion and joy, even if it’s just for a couple of days. I believe that if you can find a way to invite gratitude into your life, however small, it will bring more things to be grateful for along with it.

Happy holidays to you and yours.