12 minute read
THE ART OF CAREGIVING WITH AMY O'ROURKE
The Art of Caregiving
with Amy O'Rourke
America’s Advocate for Caregivers and Families Keeping Peace in the Family
153 million Americans provide unpaid care to a loved one every year. With 10,000 of us turning 65 every day, millions more will face the challenge every year. Most are unprepared and overwhelmed. Amy O’Rourke is the friend we all need to help navigate the caregiving journey. An eldercare veteran and industry leader for 40 years, Amy has helped tens of thousands through the confusing maze of home care, assisted living, nursing homes, Medicaid, Medicare, hospital administrators, pharmacists, hospice, and the Veterans Administration. As Growing Bolder’s aging and care management expert Amy shares some advice from her new book, The Fragile Years, Proven Strategies for the Care of Aging Loved Ones for her advice on beginning the conversation.
I’ve seen siblings and entire families torn apart because of their conflicting views on what an aging loved one wants or needs after a life-changing event that makes the older person dependent on them. If there is already disharmony and dysfunction in a family, a loved one’s sudden decline will put even more strain on the relationships.
The most common issues I’ve seen cause family tension when a parent turns fragile are:
→ Conflicting views over a course of action → How much care will cost, and either the parent or one of the siblings can’t agree about the costs → Understanding the loved one’s medical, mental, and emotional challenges → Determining the level and type of care needed and where it should be provided → Finding a comfortable and safe place for the loved one to live → The daunting task of collecting, organizing, and updating the paperwork on health insurance, prescriptions, Social Security, veteran’s benefits, pensions, financial records, mortgages, utilities, and other bills There are a few practical and proactive things you and your family members can do in planning for your loved one’s fragile years. Hopefully your parents have communicated who they want to be their power of attorney. If they haven’t chosen someone, I suggest that a family member gently bring up the topic by saying something like this: “In case there is a crisis, we want to know who is assigned to legally represent you and follow your wishes.”
If the individual can’t leave home, many attorneys will make house calls. If this seems impossible to broach with them, hire a care manager or another trusted advisor to have this discussion. It’s amazing how much work can get done when the person managing the work is not a relative!
You certainly should talk through possible scenarios as a family to make sure you are all on the same page, and then give the appointed decision maker your support. This trusted family member can take the point in dealing with doctors, nursing home administrators, lawyers, financial advisors, and all other critical contacts when fast action is required.
Takeaway Tips
For more Caregiving Tips from Amy O’Rourke read The Fragile Years, Proven Strategies for the Care of Aging Loved Ones
→ Begin preparing yourself and your parent for the fragile years as they enter their 70s. → Gather critical information on wills, preferred funeral and burial arrangements, bank and investment accounts, health and life insurance, medical records, loan and mortgage accounts. → While your parent is still mentally fit, discuss their preferences for the late stages of life, especially their feelings and preferences regarding life-sustaining procedures and where they prefer to spend their final days.
Use examples of other people and what they did if loved ones won’t open up about themselves. → As your parent approaches the fragile years, contact several local nursing homes and get to know the staff members on a personal level. → If your parent is resistant to any help, search for a trusted advisor: care managers are trained to provide help in these types of scenarios. It is money well spent. → Make the most of the time you have remaining with your loved one. This is your opportunity to create even more meaningful memories and to let them know once again that they are loved and will be remembered.
– Nadeem Khan
CLASSIC CAR RESTORER
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Keeping The Spark in Their Art
For John Whipple, art is a puzzle, and one the award-winning painter and sculptor is good at solving. “I loved puzzles and games and play, and art is all that,” John said. “It takes you as deep down that rabbit hole of thinking as you want to go. And it's just fascinating.”
When he met Lynn Byrne, now Whipple, in a film production class at Valencia College in 1988 John met someone who shared that fascination — not just with art, but with life.
“She has an amazing eye,” John said. “That's how I knew she was an artist. She just looks at the world like an artist. She's fascinated by everything she looks at.”
That artistic eye is a part of Lynn Whipple’s DNA. Art was what her family did. Her grandfather and mother painted, her grandmother played piano, and Lynn and her sister drew.
“I always remember coming home from school because of the smell of turpentine,” she said. “It still makes me think of my granddad, and my mom…in the living room, painting. I remember I made this drawing of a golfer one time and they all raved about it. That was a moment where I'm thinking, "Oh, this is good. This is positive for people.’”
While Lynn is self-taught, John graduated from the University of Central Florida with a degree in graphic arts and studied illustration.
“I always wanted to do art,” John said. “I didn't question it. I didn't know in what capacity; I didn't know how to do it, but it was where I was drawn. My parents were very supportive of it. And I think that's lucky because a lot of people, they're not.”
The film production class led John and Lynn to each other, and to work at Nickelodeon Studios where John was a scenic painter and Lynn worked finding props and set decorating, eventually becoming an art director. The work was good and fun, but working one show led to working another, leaving little time for their own artwork. After several years, they had a choice to make.
“After a while we said, just don't say yes (to another show) — say yes to your artwork,” Lynn said. “Say no to the show because you work a billion hours in production. And it's all consuming. And if we put that much energy into our artwork, we're going to do fine. So, that's what we did.”
The Whipples followed their passions and took the leap into art fulltime, going out on what Lynn calls “the skinny branches.” There were lean times: a rusty black truck that racked up mileage traveling from art show to art show, and an ugly booth with a blue tarp they lugged along, casting a garish hue on all their artwork. But slowly, they found their tribe.
They entered art shows in the Midwest and earned sales enough to keep going. Soon the Whipples had collectors ready and waiting to see what they brought out next. The skinny branches were filling in, and ironically, it was a stick at an art show in Atlanta that assuaged John’s fathers concerns about the couple’s
Follow Lynn's selfie series and meet her trusted assistant, Daisy. lynnwhipple
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ability to survive as fulltime artists.
Lynn installed her work on a large board at the back of their booth. She hung two little paintings and then looked around, found a stick, and mounted it below the paintings.
“Someone came up and wanted to buy the paintings, and the stick,” said John. “And Lynn charged her like $65 for the stick. She bought it and we laughed. And my dad, later on said, ‘When I saw that Lynn sold a stick for $65, I stopped worrying.’"
“A stick that I literally had just picked up off the ground,” said Lynn. “For the record it was a very nice stick,” John noted.
Unlike some of their peers who stayed in one discipline or genre, John and Lynn kept reaching, kept evolving. Lynn started with mosaics, collage, altered photographs and mixed media with found objects. Eventually she tried the one discipline she’d avoided: painting. She learned to mix paint and use oils. It was a long learning process. She cut the many rejects into pieces and used them in collages. She kept going and kept learning, figuring out light and dark, form and shadow.
“It was so challenging, and still is, and that's what I liked about it,” Lynn said. “I think my superpower was, I just didn't really care what people thought. I knew it was sucking, so….it couldn't hurt my feelings if they said, ‘Oh my God, this sucks.’
“And I'm still sucking, but you got to just keep at it. I think if you're committed and genuinely interested in something, you just do it and it doesn't matter what the outcome is. You're just doing it because you have to do it, and that's it.”
“Once she learned that drawing didn't have to be draftsmanship then she started to really blossom; because now she's using the drawing as an element with the rest of her stuff and it's exquisite,” John said. “And I think that gave her all the confidence in the world to sort of just move on, and now she's bold and fearless about everything. She's just constantly
John Whipple turned a 1977 Cadillac Coup deVille into a 'Circus of the Absurd' and add sculpture to his art mediums.
coming up with ideas…and that kind of energy is contagious.”
John’s art evolved as well. Paintings layered with collage, oil paintings, charcoal drawings, using the face not as portrait but as a motif. Along the way came sculpture.
Fellow artists and friends introduced the Whipples to folk art and the concept of art cars. Soon John took a motorized carving tool he’d received as a gift and made a crude figure that he drilled into the hood of a 1977 gold Cadillac Coupe deVille. The ringmaster of the Circus of the Absurd was born, and so was John’s entry into sculpture and a connection with an unconventional, lighter side of art.
“It got me into sculpture,” John said. “And it got me into this other kind of humor and into being more carefree. When you have ambition you want to be taken seriously, and this was a counterpoint to that. It was almost like, okay, in this world I'll just do whatever. This is just fun.”
The art car went out with a blaze of glory after a demolition derby, but the humor remains in John’s sculptures, with odd heads tied to disproportionate bodies, figures not tied to reality. And as the Whipples’ art continues to evolve, it continues to garner recognition and sales.
“It works for us to keep experimenting,” Lynn said. “Now the people that collect our work, they can't wait to see what the heck weird thing John or I come up with, because they're bought into our brains as always going for the experiment.
“You lose collectors when you change,” she added. “But then you get new ones. And then there's those really great people who just ride the wave with us our whole lives, that's kind of amazing.”
Replicating work in one genre might have been more financially beneficial, but in their minds the work would have suffered.
“It doesn't really work for my brain to be redundant very much,” John said. “And it doesn't really work for hers either. That was never where our passion was. It was to try to be an artist and grow and keep that initial childhood spark about making art alive.”
Today the Whipples exhibit in shows across the country, Lynn teaches online classes, and they are both a vital part of McRae Art Studios, an artist collective founded by John’s parents, George and Marty Whipple, in 1987. Married 30 years in 2022, the support and perspective John and Lynn offer each other enriches their work and their lives.
“I helped her sort of be more analytical and learn to draw,” John said. “And she really helped me learn how to design, more about color and more about putting things together. And you need that — you need both sides. She can look at my stuff and go, ‘Hmm. You know…’ And I'm like, ‘Yeah, you're right.’ And vice versa.”
“I don't know how I could have done it without you,” agreed Lynn. “I mean, I wouldn't have wanted to, because art is all we talk about. This film, that color, that palette, and that thing. So, that's kind of our language with each other.”
“I would say looking at our life, I don't think we ever lost the passion,” Lynn added. “If we won the lottery tomorrow, we're just going to get a bigger art studio, an assistant or something awesome. I cannot imagine we would ever stop making art. I mean, I always think we might be getting good. Maybe when we’re 90 or 95 we’ll get good.”