Finding Life in the Land of Alzheimer’s: One Daughter’s Hopeful Story
Product Description
Previously published in HC as Dancing With Rose
One journalist’s riveting—and surprisingly hopeful— in-the-trenches view of Alzheimer’s
Nearly five million people in the United States are living with Alzheimer’s. Like many children of Alzheimer’s sufferers, Lauren Kessler, an accomplished journalist, was devastated by the disease that seemed to erase her mother’s identity even before claiming her life. But suppose people with Alzheimer’s are not slates wiped blank. Suppose they experience friendship and loss, romance and jealousy, joy and sorrow? To better understand this debilitating condition, Kessler enlists as a bottom-of-the-rung caregiver at an Alzheimer’s facility and learns lessons that challenge what we think we know about the disease. A compelling, clear-eyed, and emotionally resonant narrative, Finding Life in the Land of Alzheimer’s offers a new optimistic look at what the disease can teach us and a much-needed tonic for those faced with providing care for someone they love.
For more information: Finding Life in the Land of Alzheimer’s: One Daughter’s Hopeful Story
Finding Life in the Land of Alzheimer’s: One Daughter’s Hopeful Story
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Dancing with Rose was a wonderful story. I found the author’s thoughts very poignant. To me, the story was written with a bittersweet air, but the reader could feel Ms. Kessler’s struggle and affirmation at finding the positive in the debilitating disease of Alzheimer’s. She resolves that appreciating the here and now is so very important for all of us. She comes to this conclusion in her dealings with the Alzheimer’s patients.
Rating: 5 / 5
I am the Exec. Director at an Adult Day Program, and in that capacity I facilitate a Caregiver’s Support Group every month. I purchase a lot of books (Dementia Related) for our caregiver’s library. I try very hard to pre-read every one and this book was FANTASTIC. If the budget would allow, I would get a copy for ALL my caregivers. The author truly transported me inside a Health Care Facility and into the lives of people with this horrid disease. Although our goal is to keep folks OUT of nursing homes as long as possible, the possibility is always in the back of a caregivers mind. This book will take some of the fear away. It wouldn’t hurt to read this one over and over again.
Rating: 5 / 5
Lauren Kessler weaves a fabric of understanding of those needing Alzheimer’s care and the caregivers (family/facility.) Her witing provides the reader with humor, compassion, insight, and appreciation. One of the best!
Rating: 5 / 5
When Lauren Kessler visited her mother in a home for Alzheimer’s patients, taking along her youngest child, a four-month-old baby, her mother’s response shocks her. “What is that thing? Get that thing away from me.”
Kessler and her mother had struggled for years, Kessler keeping her distance as her mother fell apart and eventually died. Yet some years later, Kessler is drawn into the world she didn’t want any part of, “the land of Alzheimer’s,” and takes a job on the lowest rung of the ladder, doing the grunt work in a facility built expressly for dementia patients.
I thought many times, as my father succumbed to Alzheimer’s, of what it would be like to put himin a nursing home. I didn’t have to–but what if I’d been married with young children? What if I’d been working fifty hours a week, as I’d been doing just a few years before? He might well have wound up in a home, no matter how much he didn’t want to go. Millions of people with Alzheimer’s face this possibility, and Kessler’s service, in writing this book, is to show us what life is like inside, to remind us of who is looking after our elderly, and to show that while life in such homes is far from perfect, decent people are making surprising connections with those who have been all but dismissed from the larger world.
Rating: 4 / 5
Like a daytime soap, “Maplewood 90210–”The Old and the Restless”, plays out in this true narrative by Lauren Kessler. She takes on a low paid caregiver job at the Alzheimer’s home to better understand what her own Mother went through, and to be able to write about it later. Getting to know the patients, learning their daily routines, and where they are “coming from” keeps Lauren busy the first week.
Marianne …the most “educated, erudite and articulate patient” maintains her dignity and position as though she never left her career as a university administrator. Her “brain now working on autopilot”, she carries on conversations with Lauren while waiting for an imaginary appointment to show up. When you’re around these folks you play by their rules.
Hayes, one of the few men at Maplewood, wants constant attention —I’m itchy, I’m itchy, Rub my back ..Help me Help me…” Still a charmer though, dapper looking dressed in very nice clothes provided by his daughter. He was a stoic man, but Alzheimer’s has unleashed his voice. Ever the engineer, his questions never stop as he demands to be told What’s next? What is that? What are you doing? Why do I have to? His comments are often witty and right on mark.
Many are scared and angry all the time, and others are passive, peaceful, acquiescent, doing what they’re told. Ask Vivian what did she did yesterday and hear “we went out on a bus, didn’t we? I wonder what we went out to see, well, we had a good time, I know that … it sure was fun while it was happening.”
Then there is Rose … now a ghost shuffling from room to room, taking someone’s socks, or laundry, or teeth or glasses, and delivering them to the next room. An AM gal always in motion. And can she ever dance! Hands and feet moving in never-forgotten rhythm. Just ask her and you’re off for a whirl around the “dance floor” wherever that might be.
When Lauren works the second shift, she sees how nearly all are affected by Sundowner’s syndrome … the agitation, confusion, depression and delusions that come with the setting sun.
As Hayes lets go of life, Lauren takes us through the end stage, identical to the path I walked that final week with my sister.
The work is hard and demanding…emptying colostomy or urine bags, changing diapers, wiping butts, showering and shaving, dressing, feeding. With eleven patients to put through their daily care plan and to keep track when they’ve wandered off, Lauren seldom has a break. But she finds an “optimistic view on what Alzheimer’s has to teach us….”
Take time to read this one.
Quotes are from Dancing with Rose
Rating: 5 / 5