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Uncertain Inheritance, An: Writers on Caring for Family
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List Price: $24.95
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Manufacturer: William Morrow
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Average Customer Rating: 
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 362.0425
EAN: 9780060875305
ISBN: 0060875305
Label: William Morrow
Manufacturer: William Morrow
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 304
Publication Date: 2007-12-01
Publisher: William Morrow
Release Date: 2007-11-13
Studio: William Morrow
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Editorial Reviews:
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In this eloquent collection of essays—from the editor of the national bestseller Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression—contributors reveal their experiences in caring for family through illness and death Today, thirty million people look after frail family members in their own homes. This number will increase drastically over the next decade—as baby boomers tiptoe toward old age; as soldiers return home from war wounded, mentally and physically; as a growing number of Americans find themselves caught between the needs of elderly parents and young children; as medical advances extend lives and health insurance fails to cover them. This compelling book offers both literary solace and guidance to the people who find themselves witness to—and participants in—the fading lives of their intimates. Some of the country's most accomplished writers offer frank insights and revelations about this complex relationship. Julia Glass describes the tension between giving care—to her two young sons—and needing care after being diagnosed with breast cancer; Ann Harleman explores her decision to place her husband in an institution; Sam Lipsyte alternates between dark humor and profound understanding in telling the story of his mother's battle with cancer; Ann Hood wishes she'd had more time as a caregiver, to prepare herself for the loss of her daughter; Andrew Solomon examines the humbling experience of returning as an adult to be cared for by his father; cartoonist Stan Mack offers an illustrated piece about the humor and hell of making his way through the medical bureaucracy alongside his partner, Janet; Julia Alvarez writes about the competition between her and her three sisters to be the best daughter as they tend to their ailing parents. An Uncertain Inheritance examines the caregiving relationship from every angle—children caring for parents; parents caring for children; sib-lings, spouses, and close friends, all looking after one another—to reveal the pain, intimacy, and grace that take place in this meaningful connection.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Well written and valuable insights
Comment: Both my husband and I thoroughly enjoyed this book. My mother is in a nursing home and has dementia.
Customer Rating:
Summary: uncertain inheritance
Comment: This is a wonderful case book for caregivers. Many different situations are included and the essays are thoughtful and well written. It's a must for all those involved in such cases, including health and psychological problems. I came away with many ideas to help in my own caregiving.
fwt
Customer Rating:
Summary: The New Wave CareGivers
Comment: The variety of emotions and experiences in this beautifully written and profoundly felt collection covered about 80% of my gifts and disasters during my 12 years of 24/7/365. It's wonderful when we can read that others share our sorrows and joys while putting careful and caring words and analysis to them. New Wave CareGivers are not your father's Buick anymore.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Courageous, Well-Written, and Achingly Real
Comment: All of us at some point in our lives will need to confront the issues written about in this eloquent collection -- whether it's our parents, our spouses, our siblings, our friends, or even ourselves. The writers here tackle the subject with intimacy, poignancy, grace...and a great amount of courage.
There are stand-outs for me in this collection: the writer Helen Schulman asking her father, "We all love you, we still have fun together, we still can enjoy one another, does any of that help at all?" Her father's reply: "No, you and your love don't help me." As a daughter myself trying to tackle my mother's depression after my father's death, this line really resonated.
Then there's Eleanor Cooney's remarkable essay, "Death in Slow Motion", about her mother's descend into Altzheimer's disease and the toll it takes on her -- unflinchingly real, not at all flowery, straightforward and raw. Or Ann Hood's essay "In The Land of Little Girls", about the death of her five-year-old daughter...which broke my heart by the courage it took to go back to those emotions and write it so perfectly. And Amanda Fortini's "The Vital Role" about her own debilitating tropical illness and her symbiotic relationship with her caregiver: "a story that arose from a perfect confluence of needs: one person's desperate need to be cared for and another's equally urgent need to care."
I could go on and on about these gems, all focusing on the most elemental of needs -- connection, intimacy, loss, courage. This is an important book, and I recommend it wholeheartedly.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Essential reading for all adults
Comment:
Most of us are amateurs in caring for ill people. As one reviewer wrote, the burden of doing so "is apt to descend upon us like a blow from fate, stunning and unforeseen. ... [Then] something cracks open -- a father or a friend gets cancer, a mother succumbs to Alzheimer's, a husband has a terrible accident, a child dies -- and what Virginia Woolf once called "extreme reality" floods in." Any one of us can find ourselves unexpectedly tested to the limits of our endurance.
In number terms, there are 30 million caretakers in this country, and of course at least 30 million patients. As our population ages, both numbers are sure to grow, and the number of patients will undoubted grow faster than the number of caretakers.
These 19 people have written honest accounts of their experiences. The essays will help anyone understand the possible tests to their own endurance: the blow may happen to you as a caretaker or as a patient -- in either event, it will help to be as prepared as you can be.
Caretakers in this book describe the burden as "a black hole of time and energy," a "Black Balloon," "our own little prison," "Planet Autism" and "this unfamiliar country with different weathers, different rules." The caretaker's love is often meaningless; "You and your love don't help me," Helen Schulman's father says. "How could this be? How could this endless reservoir of affection and attachment and respect that I felt for this man prove so powerless, so worthless?"
Dr. Jerome Groopman finds that when a friend is diagnosed for cancer, "for the first time in my career I had reached my limits as a treating physician... [Now I'm only a] physician once removed."
Many caretakers can't escape at all. Scot Sea, the father of a severely autistic 15-year-old girl, describes the daily routine as "just the same scene from the same interminable clip on the late show from hell". He has contempt for those "New Age pests, overdosed on media mythology," who tell him "that being the parent of an autistic child is a blessing." Nevertheless he continues to take care of his daughter.
Helen Schulman echoes the thought: "I think that people like to believe there is a reward in the end for caregiving. There were no rewards."
So does Ann Harleman: "MS is something that goes on happening .... Something huge and black that descends slowly and inexorably and surrounds you ... Bruce and I have christened it the Black Balloon. To anyone who sees me ... I seem to be in their world, the world of the well. Going about my work, going about my life. But, actually, I am inside the Black Balloon with Bruce."
Eleanor Cooney writes of reaching her limits: "I felt hard and mean and full of sorrow all at once, and it drove me truly mad. Drove me, in fact, to drink." She moves her mother into an assisted living center, who finds her too "high maintenance" for the staff to handle. With her mother back home, she asks" "What would you do? I'm still waiting for the answer."
Abigail Thomas cares for her brain damaged husband: "Sometimes I feel as if I'm trying to rescue a drowning man and I only have time to rise to the surface for one gasp of air before I go back down again. There is an exhilaration to it, a high born only partly of exhaustion, and I find myself almost frighteningly alive."
Ann Harleman writes that her marriage improved when her husband was moved to a nursing home: "I'm no longer his physical caregiver, I'm no longer implicated in his illness. ... Because our bodies don't connect, our hearts can."
There are essays here by Andrew Solomon, Amanda Fortini and Julia Glass discussing the patient's perspective: "the helplessness of surrendering to another, the paradox of both wanting attention and not." No one speaks for the patients who have no one to be their caretaker, an increasingly large group of people. And, you may find some essays weak, too light hearted or too New Age or even too self indulgent.
My personal advice: don't judge others too harshly. Sometimes the very best that someone can do is far below your own standards. Each of us has to face these challenges, whether caretaker or patient in our own way. It is very easy to criticize how others face their challenges, but if this book does nothing else, it should convince the reader that there is no "right way".
Robert C. Ross 2008
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