"From a gifted writer who spent two years in a support group for people caring for elderly and ill spouses, parents, and friends, The Caregivers chronicles the daily experiences--heart-breaking, poignant, and redemptive--of ordinary Americans as they face their final life passages"--
A tribute to the millions of Americans who serve as caregivers to ill and aging family members traces the author's support group experiences with individuals who have worked through personal and financial hardships to provide for loved ones.
A moving, intimate, and compassionate book that chronicles the experiences of a group of long-term caregiversspouses, parents, and friends of the elderly and illilluminating critical issues of old age, end-of-life care, medical reform, and social policyand providing comfort in the time-honored form of shared experience (The Minneapolis Star-Tribune).
In 2010, journalist Nell Lake began sitting in on the weekly meetings of a local hospitals caregivers support group. Soon members invited her into their lives. For two years, she brought empathy, insight, and an eye for detail to understanding Penny, a fifty-year-old botanist caring for her aging mother; Daniel, a survivor of Nazi Germany who tends his ailing wife; William, whose wife suffers from Alzheimers; and others with whom all caregivers will identify.
Witnessing acts of devotion and frustration, lessons in patience and in letting go, Lake illuminates the intimate exchanges of caregiving and care-receiving and considers important and timely social issues: How can we care for the aging, ill, and dying with skill and compassion, even as the costs and labors of care increase? How might the medical profession take into account the needs of caregivers as well as patients? InThe Caregivers Nell Lake shares a thoughtful and tenderly reported depiction of the real-life predicaments that evoke these crucial questions.
With more and more people spending their late years ill and frail, and 43 million Americans already caring for family members over age fifty, this is an important chronicle of a widely shared experience and a public concern. The Caregivers is as elegantly constructed as a novel, but more than that, Lake writes about these people with such warmth and vividness that they feel as memorable as our favorite fictional characters. It is a beautifully written account (The Boston Globe).
