REQUIRED READING
GABRIELLA M. GEISINGER is a New Yorker now living in London. Her freelance writing focuses on arts & culture, feminism, and human rights.
DEALING WITH A PARENT who develops dementia or Alzheimer’s is nothing new to the universe, and, yet, one of the hardest parts of being involved in a parent’s transformation—from Mom or Dad to patient, and then to child, and then to something not even quite that—is that there are very few people to talk to. Those who haven’t had to deal with this type of caregiving or witness this kind of deterioration praise caregivers for their selflessness without quite understanding how trying it can be. There is little solace, even sometimes from other family members.
Fortunately, in recent years, myriad memoirs that deal with this topic have been published. As I began to dig through my own memory bank to write about my experience taking care of my father—who was diagnosed with dementia at age eighty-one, when I was seventeen—I found solace in the work of
