Care partners are the essential ingredient in the life of a person diagnosed with dementia.
Whether relative or friend, we are there to fill in the gaps when memory fails, to prompt, encourage, and generally oversee the well being of that person. We enter this role unexpectedly, untrained, and totally unprepared for our own mixture of emotions. We may experience frustrations, anger, grief and depression, and a sense of despair that we are not coping better. This is all hard to understand, and even harder to explain, except to those who are also living with the situation.
This book acknowledges that recognition of these reactions is the first step to managing our daily experience, and we will learn to cope, and to live, and even laugh, When Goodbye Begins. |