Everyone has a life story.  Sharing your life story with others is the first step in creating sustainable relationships and possible long term friendships.  Having others around who understand what makes you tick, show interest, and connect to your life experiences can only add to a higher degree of life satisfaction.

In long term care, resident life stories use to be discovered by accident.  An incidental conversation with a family member may shed some light into knowing the person’s background, preferences and work experiences.  Having that insight shared among caregivers between shifts would be even less likely.  The happenstance of gaining life story information was usually superficial at best.   The person who is now a room or bed number in our health care system was more often defined by their diagnosis and their plan of care then by their life experiences.   Understanding a person’s life story is one element to changing the culture of long term care. This philosophy is called person centered care.

November is both National Caregiver’s month and Alzheimer’s Awareness month. The life story of a person living with memory loss becomes even more significant as their ability to share it themselves and establish their own relationship wanes.  As a tribute to those residents, both family care givers and our paid care givers were asked to create a digital life story using meaningful photos, music, art and other creative expressions.   What originally began as an idea to honor those living with memory loss turned out to have a much more significant meaning for those telling the story.  My epiphany was that a caregiver’s life story needs to be discovered, told and understood to truly acknowledge the person whose life is being paid tribute.

Yes, in person centered care a life story is traditionally about the resident.  I now understand that to center care on a person is to include their loved ones.  Exuding from these videos are the love, pride, pain and sadness that define a caregiver.  It is a realization of how Alzheimer’s and dementia has impacted their own life story.   We’ve always known that people who take care of others are special and incredibly selfless.  But how often do we ever take the time to find out why?  The video tributes give us a glimpse into the eyes of those who can no longer tell their story and into the heart of those who love them.  You may view these tributes at our video tribute site, to judge for yourself.  Maybe it will inspire you to post a life story for someone you love.