Customer Reviews

Caring for Mother: A Daughter's Long Goodbye

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(3)
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Virginia Stem Owens's latest book is a tremendously valuable account of the author's intricate relationship with her elderly mother, ill with dementia. While it reads as an absorbing narrative--sometimes sad, sometimes funny, always keenly honest--it also offers a carefully observed and researched medical history, bound to be instructive to both older and younger readers.

When her mother's physical frailty became problematic and Owens left her Kansas home to stay nearby her parents in Texas, she had no idea the sojourn would span seven years. In that time, her mother's diagnosis moved from Parkinson's disease to Alzheimer's, and Owens watched what she calls the "slow dismantling" of the intelligent and capable person she had known all her life.

What distinguishes this book from other records of a similar kind is Owens's unfailing sense of irony. She takes no prisoners. No one, including herself or her mother, is spared her perceptive eye and subtle wit. Doctors and medical staff particularly, are depicted with total frankness--too busy, too hasty, forgetful, insensitive--including the psychiatrist who tells the patient chirpingly to "get out more" and "find a purpose in life."

Yet the book is fair and full of compassion and the tone throughout is exactly right, an unusual accomplishment when the topic itself runs the gamut of emotions and human idiosyncracies. This is a tough record to read, but hardly depressing, and a wise-spirited author helps you through.

This book is very true to life. Since I am in the eighth year of caring for my 98-year-old mom with Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease, I can definitely relate to many of the incidents written here. There are so many similarities to our past and present. I think it is a good book, especially for someone who is just beginning to care for their loved one. It helps with some of the unknowns "down the road."

Though the title did not sound promising, I try to read every personal account of Alzheimer's I come across, so I bought this book and sat down with it one night in my reading chair--and didn't get up for three hours. The writing was fluid, the characters strong, the dilemmas painful and eternal. "Caring for Mother" turned out to be both subtle and incisive, an essential book on dementia and patient care, perfectly contained in 163 pages.

"This is not a cheerful book," Virginia Owens explains in her Opening Note, "but it is truthful."

It's truthful, and it's vivid. The book has a story to tell, as it tracks the author's mother through an ever-increasing dementia toward what we know from the start will be a disaster. In the early chapters Virginia Owens helps look after her mother at home. Her mother has little faith in medicine: "She goes to the doctor the way I went to church as a teenager, bitter and under duress. She takes her pills like an apostate receiving communion, with little hope in their efficacy. A dark night for both soul and body."

It's worse later, in the nursing home--that place, Owens says, "the name of which strikes terror into every person's heart." When she goes to visit her mother, most of the other residents ignore her. She doesn't blame them, "They had every right to their withdrawal. Only a handful of residents have visitors who come on even a weekly basis. Most are visited occasionally, some rarely or never. People who've been abandoned develop a thick coat of defensive frost."

Owens' indictment of nursing homes is calm, steady, devastating. It's as abiding as the anger she sees in the residents: "You can feel it as soon as you come in the door. Cold Rage. For most of the people parked in wheelchairs, their anger has gone so stale after years of overuse that the emotion is routine now.... Anyone is culpable who comes through the front doors and is free to leave again under their own steam."

Owens does her best for her mother, the best that she can manage. But what never goes away, she says, what "doesn't wear out or disappear, is the feeling--no, the certain knowledge--that I could have done more, done better."

I could quote half this book, it's so good.

This is the first book I've read of Virginia Stem Owens and it's an engaging memoir. Her mother's illnesses propel the book in incremental fashion and points. If you are caring for an elderly parent or person (which I am) it is informative.

If you are looking for sentimental memoir look elsewhere. I picked this book for that reason and to try to help me through the trials of my own life and it turned out to be the perfect choice. The trials Owens and her mother go through are heart wrenching and frustrating but she keeps the facts straight and the sentimentality low. She forges through all the trials with very little emotion. But the last chapter reels it all in and encircles you with hope and strength. It's a good, informative, strength building read.

I have been taking care of my mother, who has Alzheimer's Disease, for a few years. More recently (6 mos ago) she has moved into my home. I laughed and cried when I read this book. I totally can related to each and every event. And yet, I feel privileged to be able to provide the care my mother needs at this time.

This book arrived at a time when I really needed the uplift. It is not a caregiver guide. That has been done very well by other authors, in such as "The 36-Hour Day". This authors work touches the heart of a daughter who becomes a caregiver. . After a year or so into caregiving, I discovered there are those who are known as "the dutiful daughter". That is my tag. We owe it to each other to pass along any support or information that helps us through this process of grieving our living parent while at the same time assuming a role as their caregiver. No matter our actual level of hands-on caregiving, we assume an awesome responsibility, and have little recourse but to see it through to its natural end in spite of the personal hardships. I passed this book on to my neighbor only yesterday. It is my hope that she will do the same.

I bought two copies of this book, Caring for Mother, to share with my sisters. It captures the emotional pain of dealing with the mental decline of a loved parent, the desire to provide the best care possible with the dispair of knowing it is not enough, even then, to alleviate his/her suffering. The author captures the emotional roller-coaster well, and her reflections on herself as well as her research into the physical realities serve as a helpful resource to the reader. I especially valued her final realization that the struggle, while painful, can lead to a deeper awareness of the value and meaning of human life.

Unlike other reviewers of this book, I didn't find "Caring For Mother" particularly helpful with my own journey of caring for my mother who suffers from Alzheimer's disease. Ms Owens opens her book by writing, "I had never seen the logic in asking 'Why me?' when some calamity befell me." Even so, the remaining 163 pages felt, to me, that she does just that. There is no doubt that Ms Owens loved her mother dearly and cared for her as best as circumstances allowed, but "Caring for Mother" is a memoir of her mother's emotional and physical decline, and not a book that gives any kind of guidance with helping others to deal or cope with a similar, situation. As people are living longer and longer, it is not only common to know someone who is in a nursing or "memory care" facility, but uncommon NOT to have witnessed these facilities up close at some point in life. Warehousing the elderly and demented is rarely satisfying for either the patient or the family, yet Ms Owens spends a significant part of her book going on and on about the horrors of her mother's stay in a nursing home. I felt, at times, that she was trying to assuage a sense of overwhelming guilt over her mother's existence during the last five years of her life--something that was neither helpful nor reassuring for those of us who are on the brink of having to make difficult decisions about our own loved-one's future. Even though Ms Owens appears to have an extended family (siblings, in-laws, and grown children), nowhere in the book did they play any part in supporting either Ms Owens or her mother. If they did, it certainly wasn't mentioned at any length-- something that, again, I found very discouraging and unsettling given the fact that Ms Owens wrote repeatedly of being emotionally overwhelmed by her mother's illness.

Ms Owens writes well and with obvious emotion, but this is not a book that will offer advice (or even hope) on coping with caregiving for the seriously ill. "Caring" is a very personal memoir about a very distressing subject, but is hardly uplifting in any sense of the word.

This book is a MUST read for anyone dealing with Parkinson's or any dementia related disease. It is word for word what I have experienced in the last 2 years with my parents. My Mother had Parkinson's and my Dad was taking care of her alone. I walked into a nightmare and overnight all of our worlds were changed forever. I thank you so much, Virginia, for writing this book and sharing your story with us. It affirms what my family and I have been going through in every single phase of any given day. Now I know I'm not crazy. This has been very hard and I need to be gentle with myself and to realize that I can't and won't just "spring back" over night and be back in my "normal little world" again. This book will help people to understand where their loved one is and how THEY feel as the decline of Parkinson's sets in. I read it and look back and have "a ha" moments throughout the book. I'm just sorry I didn't know these things at the time. But, at least I can know it now, thanks to your insights and hopefully other people can learn from this book as they are going through this walk with a loved one. Blessings to you, Virginia, and to those who pick this book up and read it. Profound information, to say the least.

DEEPLY MOVING STORY ABOUT CARING FOR MOTHER WHO HAS DEMENTIA--FAST READING--ESPECIALLY IF YOU ARE IN THIS SAME SITUATION.