ALZHEIMERS

Changing My Game To Help My Sister With Alzheimer’s

Adjusting expectations and communication accordingly

Jill Ebstein
Crow’s Feet: Life As We Age
5 min readNov 12, 2024

--

Olde woman on phone smiling
Getty Images for Unsplash+

My career in business began with a truism that can be used in every facet of our lives.

Meet your customers where they are.

It wasn’t too hard in business. I would interview people, look at the data, work with a team to revise our plan, rinse, and repeat. Needs change all the time, and those who are best at their job know how to measure and adjust.

I remembered this dictum recently when it was clear that my sister had progressed to the next stage of Alzheimer’s. How would I meet her where she is, I wondered. This has been my first time witnessing the disease with someone I love, and it has been heartbreaking.

How did I know my sister had taken a turn for the worse? In March, I published a young adult book, which I dedicated to her. I wrote in a clean, simple voice both because that made sense given the narrator and mostly because it was my best chance at giving my sister a book that she could read and process.

She not only read the book but would call me to discuss a chapter she had just finished. She wanted to discuss whether she was taking the right messages from it and, more…

--

--

Crow’s Feet: Life As We Age
Crow’s Feet: Life As We Age

Published in Crow’s Feet: Life As We Age

“The longer I live, the more beautiful life becomes.” (Frank Lloyd Wright) Non-fiction pieces, personal essays and occasional poems that explore how we feel about how we age and offer tips for getting the most out of life.

Jill Ebstein
Jill Ebstein

Written by Jill Ebstein

I’m about dogs, our lovable and peculiar families, business, and writing in a wide lane, including fiction. I’m a positivity washer too. www.jillebstein.com