Silver Lining Journal

Silver Lining Journals for Caregivers provide: A means and process for documenting accurate, authentic, time ordered information critical to communication with health care professionals, family and friends. Although my professional background includes rewarding work as a teacher, school administrator, consultant, and manager, my greatest sense of accomplishment and satisfaction stems from twenty years of caregiving for my family. It's the career move for which I was least prepared and most challenged. Yet work as a frontline caregiver for my mother, father, and husband provided more job satisfaction, constructive teamwork, and sense of accomplishment and purpose than I knew possible. - Sharon Martin, Silver Lining Journals. Sharon Martin was born in Beckley, West Virginia, grew up in Fairfield, Ohio, and earned degrees from Cumberland College, University of Memphis, and University of Nebraska, Omaha. After marrying, she worked as a literacy specialist in public schools in Ohio, Tennessee, and Arkansas, before moving with her husband and two sons to her current home in Omaha, Nebraska where she continues to work as an educational consultant and caregiver advocate. Although Sharon has worked as a professional educator since 1971, she, like millions of others in our society, was beckoned to the non-professional role of caregiver. Her caregiving role began in 1988 when one of her teenage sons had a car accident that required 3 months of hospitalization and a year of recovery at home. In 1991, different caregiving responsibilities evolved when her mother fell and broke her hip, and later, suffered a mental and emotional breakdown following a carjacking and murder of her only son, Sharon's only sibling, in 1994. Unanticipated care-giving responsibilities expanded when her husband was diagnosed with stage 4 brain cancer at the same time her father was diagnosed with advanced dementia, macular degeneration, and lymphoma. From that time until June, 2011,