A Life of Care Giving – Becoming an Enlightened Caregiver

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You’ve argued politics with your aunt since high school, but failing eyesight now prevents her from keeping current with the newspaper. Your mother fractured her hip last year and is confined to a wheelchair. Your father has Alzheimer’s and only occasionally recognizes you.

Someday, as Muriel Gillick points out in this important yet unsettling book, you too will be old. And no matter what vitamin regimen you’re on now, you will likely one day find yourself sick or frail. How do you prepare? What will you need?

With passion and compassion, Gillick chronicles the stories of elders who have struggled with housing options, with medical care decisions, and with finding meaning in life. Skillfully incorporating insights from medicine, health policy, and economics, she lays out action plans for individuals and for communities. In addition to doing all we can to maintain our health, we must vote and organize–for housing choices that consider autonomy as well as safety, for employment that utilizes the skills and wisdom of the elderly, and for better management of disability and chronic disease.

Most provocatively, Gillick argues against desperate attempts to cure the incurable. Care should focus on quality of life, not whether it can be prolonged at any cost.

“A good old age,” writes Gillick, “is within our grasp.” But we must reach in the right direction.

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The day was cold and we were walking at a fast clip. “Jesse, I need to talk to you about Mom.? Jesse took another step, then suddenly stopped and spun around to face me. I was at least six inches taller, but amazingly, in that instant, it seemed as if we were standing there eye to eye. His gaze was hard and uncompromising. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore! She doesn’t have Old Timers!? I blinked at the pronunciation. Old Timers? Was he serious? Yes, a second look at that gritted, desperate expression told me my stepfather was dead serious. Jesse had tricked his mind into attaching this folksy, homespun name to the disease so it wouldn’t sound quite so sinister.

This book provides insight into the ways in which families can deal with this extremely difficult disease. A tender and revealing account of how a son can grapple with the challenges of a mother with Alzheimers, not all happy times but then life is not that way.

If you’re at or near this situation this is a must read!

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A memoir of a daughter, her parents and the Beast named – Alzheimer’s: A story of Life, Love and Death, Deborah Ann Tornillo chronicles the time spent taking care of her mother and father, both of whom were diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in February 2006.

“I didn’t know when I would tell this story, I just knew I would,” Tornillo writes. “Both my mother and father had Alzheimer’s; my Mom was further along in the disease process than my Dad. It was an incredible journey spending the last year and a half of their life with them, slowly watching the disease take its toll.”

36 Days Apart recounts this painful, enlightening journey, and Tornillo writes candidly about the struggles and fears she faced as her parents’ caregiver. When the diagnosis came in 2006, Tornillo bravely faced the reality that she would need to take care of them full-time. At first, this entailed monthly flights back and forth to her home state, but it quickly became apparent that the Alzheimer’s was progressing in both parents much more quickly than first anticipated.

As their disease progressed, Tornillo was faced with the difficult task of learning how to be a parent to her own parents. Through the year and a half of caring for them she extensively researched Alzheimer’s in order to provide the best care possible, all the while knowing that the disease would eventually win in the end. She found herself saying goodbye to her father first, but little did she know that her mother would pass away just 36 days later.

36 Days Apart gives an honest, unflinching look at the realities of caring for and losing loved ones to Alzheimer’s. Tornillo gives the reader an inside look into the day-to-day life she faced during her heartbreaking, difficult time. “The two most important things I learned from my parents as we traveled this road together was how to stay strong in faith and never lose compassion for others or myself,” she writes. “I was blessed to have learned from them their wisdom of life and death. I have faith that as you read my parent’s story you will gain the strength and wisdom needed to guide you.”

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[her] ability to probe beneath the surface of behaviors makes this an especially valuable book for formal and informal caregivers…. Hodgson’s direct and folksy writing style make for quick and easy reading.–Library Journal

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