Book Review: Living with Grief: Alzheimer's Disease

Abstract

This slender book is exactly what it advertises: a daughter’s guide to coping with the problems of caring for an aging parent. In this case, Lightbody uses unsent letters, journal entries, and highly personal reflections to talk about the long process of caring for her elderly mother with multiple disabilities. The book is intended to examine the impact of this kind of complex caregiving on the person, the family, and the community at large. This is an extremely personal book in which the author freely shares her complicated feelings of joy, anger, disappointment, apathy, sympathy, loss of hope, anger, and love during her caregiving career. The book is written in two parts. Part 1 is written in the form of a personal diary and deals with how Lightbody coped with the role reversal of becoming a “parent” to her own mother. Part 2, the central section, is a collection of unmailed letters to her mother that focus on such topics as her mother’s hearing problems, her blindness, her physical disabilities, her dementia, and her hallucinations. Each of these sections ends with a bulleted list describing ways of dealing with the various issues described. The letters also discuss ways of dealing with difficult people, address the specific financial and legal issues that arise, acknowledge the fact that there simply are no answers to some questions, and describe the many creative ways that Lightbody’s mother provoked guilt in her daughter. In the afterword, Lightbody points out that she wants her book to end on a hopeful, upbeat note. This is difficult, however, in that most of the letters and journal entries were written when the author was experiencing particularly tough spots in the relationship with her mother. A particularly useful feature of this book is the “Notes” section, listing the source of the quotes used throughout the book, and an “Index of Letter Topics,” which allows readers to zero in on a particular area of interest. Audrey Brown Lightbody is now retired in Claremont, California, from a lifetime of ecumenical and administrative ministries at both the local and national levels. Appropriate audiences for this book are clergy, nurses, and social workers seeking to work with elders and their families. Readers should be forewarned that this is not a research or fact-based book, but rather an intensely personal reflection on the frustrations of trying to care for someone in mental and physical decline. The book is well-written, but the content can make for difficult reading at times.