Another Book Review! : "Love in the Land of Dementia"
Saturday, January 4, 2014 at 06:42PM
If you have dementia, or are caring for a family member or friend with dementia, there's a new memoir that I'm really excited about--a short, sweet read that will leave you feeling hopeful and inspired.
I believe that “Love in the Land of Dementia” by Deborah Shouse is truly one of the best memoirs out there by an adult child caring for a parent with dementia. Not only is Shouse a talented writer, but she shows us in simple but beautifully-wrought scenes how she came to discover small ways each day to enjoy her mother’s company despite her mother’s advancing dementia.
While her perspective is uplifting, Shouse doesn’t shy away from describing the more difficult moments of dementia caregiving, such as the guilt, despair, anger, and grief we often experience, and the challenges we face dealing with the elder care system. She includes scenes in her mother’s assisted living facility and nursing home dementia ward, and with her mother’s hospice team, that many family caregivers, and elder care professionals, will find illuminating.
Her book is an easy read, full of insight, honesty, compassion, and humor. But what makes it unusual in “caregiver lit” is that it helps us see people with advanced dementia not as “dementia patients” or as “shadows of their former selves,” but as persons with a full range of emotions and needs and the ability to share love.
Shouse writes, “I would never have guessed that I could sit on the edge of a hospital bed with a noncommunicative woman and still feel the warmth of connection…She is not ‘herself’; she is not the mother I have known and the wife Dad loved. But despite all the loses, she is still someone well worth being around….When all the ordinary things are gone, the spirit can still remain.”
Shouse's writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, Reader's Digest, Newsweek, Woman's Day, Hemispheres, Family Circle, Spirituality & Health, Chicago Tribune, and MS. She writes a weekly column on love stories for the Kansas City Star, and coauthored Working Woman's Communications Survival Guide, which is now in its fifth printing, and Antiquing for Dummies. She has written several memoirs and business books and has been featured in more than a dozen Chicken Soup books.
Learn more about Deborah Shouse and her book "Love in the Land of Dementia" here.