the 7 stages of grief
caregiver 101
This guide is a blueprint crafted from the hard-earned lessons of a 20-year caregiving journey. It’s everything you need to know but rarely get told so you can fully inhabit the role of caregiver—finding moments of joy, presence, and peace in this precious time with your loved one.
What You’ll Discover in This Guide:
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Accepting & Embracing Your New Journey:
Step into the caregiver role with strength and vulnerability, learning to accept this path and the changes it brings. This section offers tools to help you reframe challenges as opportunities for connection, growth, and gratitude. -
Organize Your Path: Finances, Assets, Healthcare, & APS:
Prepare and organize effectively, covering essential practicalities often overlooked. From managing finances to handling healthcare and navigating adult protective services (APS), this section provides actionable insights on staying proactive and maintaining peace of mind. -
Finding Joy in Every Step: Caring for Your Loved One, Day by Day:
Discover how to cherish daily caregiving moments and create an environment where you and your loved one feel safe and valued. Practical tips for managing routines, adapting care approaches, and cherishing small victories are all included. -
Self-Care & Boundaries: You Can’t Pour From an Empty Cup:
Caregiving is rewarding but exhausting, making self-care essential. This section helps you establish firm, healthy boundaries, offering tools to renew your energy and stay resilient without guilt. Learn how to honor your well-being as much as your commitment to caregiving.
Caregiver 101 is a guide to managing the demands of caregiving and infusing it with meaning, hope, and joy. It’s about finding your balance in the midst of serving others and embracing the journey in its entirety. Whether you’re a new caregiver or have been on this path for years, this guide offers insights that will uplift and empower you, helping you care for your loved one—and yourself—with compassion and purpose.
A Son’s Gift: A Memoir of Unyielding Love and Unbreakable Spirit
In her award-winning memoir A Son’s Gift, Michele leaves no stone of memory unturned. With raw vulnerability and unflinching honesty, she takes us through her life’s most searing trials and deepest losses. Set against the backdrop of New York City and Westchester County, Michele’s journey began with the unimaginable—a five-year battle against Ewing’s Sarcoma, which claimed both her son and best friend.
In 2001, as her son, Nicky, began chemotherapy, Michele sought the simplest of requests: ten hours a week to sit by her child’s side. Instead, her plea was met with termination. With an unyielding resolve, she fought to keep her family together, enduring homelessness, navigating the financial and emotional ravages of grief, and finally finding herself at the YWCA—a mother forced to confront the world’s cruelty head-on while facing the most heartbreaking of losses.
But after Nicky’s passing, Michele’s journey was far from over. Struggling with her own mental health, she grappled with betrayal and the bitter isolation of a world that neither understood nor cared for her grief. Seeking solace, she turned inward, wrestling with the haunting silence, the scorn of friends who dismissed her pain, and the fleeting numbness found in a bottle. For over a decade, Michele painstakingly wove together the fragments of her story, each page a testament to the depths of her resilience, culminating in a memoir that would ultimately take her 11 years to write.
A Son’s Gift is more than a story of loss; it’s a guide to “healing it forward.” Michele’s testament to courage, healing, and perseverance stands as a powerful beacon, inspiring others to face their own darkness with the fierce hope that light can, indeed, emerge from the shadows. This memoir is a journey of healing, a reminder that while loss changes us, it also offers the power to transform and inspire those who follow.