Myrna Marofsky

TOPICS MYRNA CAN DISCUSS

Note: While her experience is with dementia, her comments relate to any caregiver, family, or spouse on the other side of a life-changing diagnosis.

• Redefining “Caregiving” to “Care-Living”: Marofsky redefines “caregiving” to “care-living” and encourages compassionate organizations and providers to incorporate this philosophy at times when a difficult medical diagnosis can be overwhelming. This means building empathic relationships by balancing head and heart and adding hints of hope in the despair. The result will be better outcomes for all parties, including higher patient and job satisfaction.
• Empowering the Care Partner (especially women)
• Keeping loving relationships through heartbreaking times
• Changing the conversation-Moving from talking about the disease to talking about living
• Defining a compass to guide you through the heartbreak
• Four gifts for care partners that will change the focus from loss to living
• How to be a good friend to a Care Partner.
• Removing the “tragedy talk” from a dementia diagnosis (for professionals)
• Family dynamics during the heartbreak

Virtual or in person

Customized to group dynamics including:

• Care providers
• Partners/spouses/families
• Medical students
• Marketing departments
• Counselors/Therapists/social workers
• Other

Marofsky’s book To The Last Dance, A Partner’s Story of Living and Loving Through Dementia  is available at a discount with presentation.

Myrna Marofsky is a serial entrepreneur and self-acclaimed “Champion of Women.” For the past 20 years, her work as a consultant has been coaching, mentoring, and supporting women business owners through their successes and extreme challenges, including the pandemic. Her business tagline was finding “possibilities that turn dreams into reality.”  Then in 2015 when her husband of 51 years was diagnosed with Early-Stage Alzheimer’s her life was turned upside-down. She was living a reality she could never have imagined, and her tagline became, “finding possibilities in realities that were far from my dreams.”

Marofsky’s story sheds light on an untold facet of a life-changing diagnosis, those on the other side—partners and spouses who also receive a diagnosis. They become part of the millions of unpaid caregivers, most of them women, who are suffering emotionally, mentally, physically, and financially, all while losing the one they love. They are feeling alone.

Because it’s a story rarely told, this diagnosis goes untreated at a high cost to our healthcare systems and government agencies.

"Who cares for the caregivers?”

Rather than a list of tactical and systemic changes, Marofsky speaks from her heart, sharing a lived experience with gems of insight and understanding for those interacting with care partners. As a care partner, she highlights the impact of the “tragedy talk” she continually received from professionals, noting how things could have been different. As a wife, she demonstrates how she built a strategy to keep bad news from becoming a bad life. As a woman, she speaks frankly about how she kept from becoming a lesser version of herself through the five years of living with dementia.

• Author: The Art of Diversity Training and Getting Started With Mentoring as well as her latest To The Last Dance, A Partner's Story of Living and Loving Through Dementia.
• Chapter Chair: Women Presidents Organization women-presidents.com
• Founder: The Business Women's Circle. www.thebwc.org
• Co-owner/President: ProGroup, Diversity consulting and training
• Co-creator of WisePacks™, a travel backpack purse for women.
• Awards: Power 50, NAWBO 2010 Women Achieve! Vision Award