When a Caring Family Tradition Comes Full Circle…

I have often been struck by how frequently attorneys I know began working in elder law after their personal struggles to find resources to help an aging member of their own family.  A slightly different family-inspired path is behind the story of attorney Joy Solomon.  She at first resisted.

In the midst of my raging adolescence in 1979, my mother was devoting most of her time to a Jewish nursing home in Baltimore where she was the board president.

 

I would come home after school, make instant mashed potatoes, settle into the comfort of our gray velour sofa and watch “General Hospital,” enraptured. Family dinner often included stories about Mom’s afternoon with the old people. In her mind, the elderly were to be revered as the bearers of history, lives lived and lessons learned; in my self-centered, adolescent thinking, old people were fragile, needy and dying. I felt more connected to soap stars like Luke and Laura than to aged Jewish grandmothers. I told myself that I’d never end up working in a nursing home like her. No way….

To continue reading how Joy found her mission and is now a part of the team at the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Center for Elder Abuse Prevention at the Hebrew Home in Riverdale, the Bronx, read Coming Full Circle to Help Her Elders, from the New York Times. 

Special thanks to Karen Miller, a former administrative law judge from New York, for sharing this story.