Friday, April 26, 2024
Roxanne Laney
ARTS & LETTERS BOOKSTORE
A reader since kindergarten, Roxanne Laney spent most of her career as a technical writer and editor, and a serial entrepreneur. Arts and Letters bookstore is her seventh business.
Alzheimer’s Disease. Just the name strikes terror in your heart. Anyone who has cared for a parent with Alzheimer’s knows why it’s terrifying. My mother passed away from the effects of this disease after nearly a decade of decline. My sister and I often discuss the onset of her illness. We didn’t recognize early symptoms; sometimes her behavior just seemed like grandstanding. But looking back, we can see the symptoms. Does it matter? Probably not. She would have been on the same twisting path, desperately trying to hang on to her sanity. As a person with a strong personality, Mom managed to live normally, alone, for quite a few years. But when the disease finally loosened her grip on reality, it was like she fell from a cliff of reason to a ravine of confusion.
Mary Moreland, a Houston lawyer, published her first book this year about her journey as her mother’s caregiver during the descent into the mystery of Alzheimer’s. It’s a book you need to know about if you are caring for someone with this illness now or ever need to. The book is called “The Gap Between: Loving and Supporting Someone with Alzheimer’s.”
Moreland’s lovely book tells us about caring for her mother, but better yet, Moreland has stuffed the pages with help and guidance and support for newcomers. She most fortunately journaled the caregiver part of her life and came up with facts, tips and resources to help other caregivers. The book is a marvelous compilation of story, advice, resources and beautiful poems written by her mother that fit with parts of the journey.
Here's what the author says about why she wrote this book:
“Putting such raw and personal information into the public domain is difficult and makes me feel exposed. However, my purpose and hope in doing so is that there is a younger me out there who will find comfort and a friend through reading it.”
You must take time to process your own loss and sadness. You need to take comfort from family and friends and ask for help and support in getting through this long process of caregiving. If you are, like I was or as Moreland was, also working full time and raising young children, getting good help for yourself is tantamount to good care for your loved one.
Moreland’s book can help you see and understand early symptoms of Alzheimer’s and suggests coping strategies. But most importantly, she shows you how important documentation is in caring for the ill parent. For example, before our mother became very ill, we all went together on a lucid day and met with an attorney. He explained to Mom how important it might be for us to have power of attorney and medical power of attorney in the event that she could no longer manage her affairs or her health. I can’t imagine how difficult this could have been if we’d have had to get court permission to handle Mom’s bills, sell her home to pay for her care, and to respond quickly to her medical emergencies. Moreland nails the documentation you need. Make sure you get it.
Hiring caregivers or placing your loved one in a memory facility will be a decision you face sooner or later. Moreland gives a wonderful account of the difficulty of this when Mom can’t remember that her husband died, or that he hadn’t left her for another woman, but she was lucid enough to see that the patients were worse off than she was. She refused to go.
Moreland talked about her book at an event for authors and booksellers. When she described her book, so many details resonated with me that I could barely keep myself together. I wanted to disappear so no one would see me crying at the table. This book will resonate with you, too. I urge you to pick it up.
This column doesn’t scream Thanksgiving, does it? It does.
People with Alzheimer’s have their ups and downs. While my mother was sick for many years, we had good moments fairly often. When we went to memory care center to see her, I could hear her voice as soon as I opened the front door. That part of her was completely the same. So normal! She’d be in the kitchen whooping it up with the staff.
Mom recognized me and my sister at that same time that she thought her grandchildren were me and my sister. She was happy up to the end. Such a contrast to my father’s short, painful battle with cancer. Mom passed quietly in her sleep one afternoon with her children by her side in the summer of 2001. It was the end of a huge chapter in my life.
roxanne@artsandlettersbooks.com | 682-936-2824
