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Adult Children, Aging Parents swapping roles with dignity, humor, and respect
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by Alex Witchel
When her smart, adoring, ultracapable mother began to exhibit undeniable signs of dementia, her smart, adoring, ultracapable daughter reacted as she'd been raised: If something was broken, they would fix it. But as medical reality undid that hope ...Witchel retreated to the kitchen, trying to reclaim her mother at the stove by cooking the comforting foods of her childhood.
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by B. Smith
Diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's at age 64, Smith found herself in a role she never pictured. The author, a former supermodel, celebrity chef and restaurateur, and a well known African American lifestyle doyenne, B., alongside husband Dan Gasby, chronicles her family's journey though her Alzheimer's diagnosis and beyond.
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by George Hodgman
A veteran magazine and book editor returns to his hometown of Paris, Missouri, to take care of his aging mother, Betty, a strong-willed woman who speaks her mind and has never really accepted the fact that her son is gay.
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by Betsy Lerner
After a lifetime defining herself in contrast to her mother's "don't ask, don't tell" generation, Lerner finds herself back in her childhood home (with) the mother she spent decades avoiding. When her mother needs help after surgery, it falls to Betsy to take care of her. She expected a week of tense civility; what she got instead were the Bridge Ladies.
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by Roz Chast
A graphic memoir by a long-time New Yorker cartoonist celebrates the final years of her aging parents' lives through four-color cartoons, family photos and documents that reflect the artist's struggles with caregiver challenges.
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by Lauren Kessler
Documents a journalist's work as a caregiver for Alzheimer's patients after the disease claimed her mother's life, a process during which she came to deeply respect and admire the contributions of a care facility's overworked, underpaid, and humor-possessing employees.
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by Eleanor Cooney
An unsentimental account of a daughter's witness to her mother's struggle with Alzheimer's describes the challenging process of caring for her mother through the stages of the disease and how it compromised their formerly close relationship.
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by Kate Mulgrew
Mulgrew ... was on a theater tour in Florida when she first received word that her father had lung cancer. Years earlier, she and her siblings had learned that their mother was suffering from atypical Alzheimer's disease. Now, she (wanted) nothing more than to return home and help her parents.
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by Katy Butler
In this eloquent exegesis on taking control of the end of one's life, Butler defines a "good death" as one that is free from unnecessary medical intervention and faced with acceptance and dignity. Butler helped her aging parents ... through several serious health issues (and their eventual deaths).
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by Elinor Fuchs
The adult daughter of an independent, divorced mother who was absent for most of her childhood describes her mother's outgoing and ambitious personality before she succumbed to Alzheimer's disease and the emotional healing that transpired in the author's life when she assumed the role of caregiver.
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Measure of the Heart : a Father's Alzheimer's, a Daughter's Return by Mary Ellen Geist Documents the story of a WCBS radio anchor who left her high-powered job to care for her Alzheimer's patient father, describing the profound lifestyle differences she embraced, her observations about the caregiver's role, and her relationships with her father and his doctors.
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by Greg O'Brien
This book ... is a first-person journey, as exhilarating as it is exhausting, into Alzheimer's by a gifted writer as he is taking it --with his mother. "My mother and I were on corresponding tracks, she was years ahead of me, but I could see her in the distance, not sure where she was.... We walked together in a collective denial until the bus for Pluto arrived."
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The Prodigal Daughter : Reclaiming an Unfinished Childhood by Margaret Gibson This exploration of the wedge that separates individuals within a social milieu and within a family tells the story of a young woman's coming of age in a Cold War world marked by divisions of race, gender, wealth, and class. Original.
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by Meryl Comer
An Emmy Award-winning broadcast journalist and leading Alzheimer's advocate shares her husband's battle with Alzheimer's disease, bringing readers face-to-face with this devastating condition and its effects on the people who have it and those who care for them.
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by Wendy Mitchell
Mitchell had a busy job with the British National Health Service, raised her two daughters alone, and spent her weekends running and climbing mountains. Then, slowly, a mist settled deep inside the mind she once knew so well, blurring the world around her. She didn't know it then, but dementia was starting to take hold.
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by Sue Miller
The author recalls her relationship with her father as she describes how she became increasingly involved in caring for him as he succumbed to the ravages of Alzheimer's, reflecting on the changing nature of memory and her struggle to care for him while dealing with her own grief and fear of abandonment.
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by Jonathan Kozol
Kozol - a celebrated crusader for a balanced public school educations - shifts his gaze to old age and the heartbreaking but strangely consoling decline of his parents in this luminous memoir. He recounts the last years of his father, Harry, when Alzheimer's robbed him of his wits but not entirely of his personality.
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by Plum Johnson
After almost twenty years of caring for elderly parents -- first for their senile father, and then for their cantankerous ninety-three-year old mother -- the author and her three younger brothers must empty and sell the beloved family home, 23 rooms bulging with history, antiques, and oxygen tanks.
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by Scott Simon
A moving meditation on the NPR host's relationship with his mother, inspired by the popular tweets he shared during her death, traces their shared love of family while profiling his mother's heroic work as a dedicated single parent.
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by Kimberly Williams-Paisley
The author shares the story of her mother's diagnosis with a rare and early form of dementia, exploring how the disease has affected their relationship and prompted her advocacy for Alzheimer's awareness.
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