My Read of An Uncertain Inheritance - Part 5

An Uncertain Inheritance: Writer’s on Caring for Family edited by Nell Casey

Joanne D. Kiggins in her blog, WritingAfterDark, gave a real review.

Finally I'm done. It is not as much fun reading a book when you know you have to write something about it. It adds a bit of responsibility I don't like and it subtracts some pleasure that I also don't like.

One funny thing is that at the end of the book there is a section called "contributors" and it has a little biographical sketch about each of the authors. I was looking them up!! I guess this means one should pay attention to the Table of Contents maybe.

Transferred by a Touch by Kerrel Mckay (read February 16, 2008)

Kerrel is a little girl of 9 when her mother tells her not to take food anymore from her father because "he has the AIDS." I spent a while trying to get my mind around that statement. It is another story about a young child having to care for an older parent. It happens a lot doesn't it?

Several things struck me about this story. One thing surprised me quite a bit. And that was the secrecy and misunderstanding about AIDS and how much I related that aspect to Alzheimer's. No one really wants to know they have Alzheimer's and no one really wants to know they have AIDS. And to admit you have Alzheimer's or AIDS can have very negative consequences. Such knowledge changes the way people treat you and it impacts your personal freedom and your ability to work and so many other things. And then there is the misinformation and misunderstanding about the diseases. I surely did not expect to draw those parallels.

I highlighted the following passage:

"That was the curse of this secret: A terrible sense of responsibility, a sense that it was within my power to make my father better."

I bet my caregiver friends recognize that.

The Animal Game; or, How I Learned to Take Care of Myself by Letting Others Care for Me by Julia Glass (read February 16, 2008)

In this story Julia has a recurrence of cancer. She has a 5 year old and a 10 year old at the time and a husband. I won't give away the meaning of the animal game but it becomes a kind of metaphor.

There's a place where she talks about the common greeting "take care" that is said between parting friends and acquaintances and she wonders about what it was supposed to mean. That made me think about that because I say stuff like that myself to those I love. What it means to me is that I am telling the person that I really love and appreciate them and I really do want them to be careful because I know bad things happen out there and I really want to see them again and a whole lot more besides. But it is quite a bit easier just to say "take care" than try to get all of that stuff out in a few nanoseconds.

Another thing she writes is about some gifts she receives and in one place she says "Why in the world would anyone want to read about murder when death is the very thing they are hoping to cheat?" One time my friend thought he was seriously ill and maybe even dying. I gave him a copy of the "Terminal Man" by Michael Crichton. It never occurred to me that it was such a terrible gift to give a friend given his circumstances until after I had handed it over. Then I felt awful. Sometimes we aren't at our best when our friends are suffering and we want to help them and our efforts are so clumsy. And I know when I was caregiving there were times like that when our friends tried to help us.

There are some really good practical things that help that are mentioned in this story.

It reminded me quite a bit of how I started out caregiving thinking I could do it all myself and not realizing just how huge the job was that stretched before me. It took some time to seek help and even more time to appreciate it.

I wonder if I've learned something permanent?

My Conclusions

I am happy I am done with the book. I am happy I read it. I am happy I wrote about it. It was a bit of a chore in a way. I think it may still be a little early for me to be reading about other caregivers and their loved ones since the abrupt end of my own caregiving life.

Abrupt end - that is something that we should talk about right there - as caregivers. It is like hitting a wall at about 100. Then you're supposed to be back to normal within seconds of the collision.

I am intrigued by the general scarcity of faith in the stories in this book and the geographic concentration of the authors. I am not exactly certain what I think about it. I already knew there was a great difference between where I live and both coasts. They call us "fly over country" after all.

I am also impressed at how much I thought about the blogs of my caregiver friends in relation to their own caregiving and how I compared and contrasted those blogs to these essays. I conclude that my experience of reading this book would have been entirely different if I had not previously read the blogs. The blogs are better than the book. It is almost as if a single essay cannot really compare to the experience of reading daily or frequent blog entries over a period of time. And that's even if the essays are written by wonderful authors as all of these are.

And of course there is the experience of reading this book on my Kindle. It was a very good experience.

The premise of the book is interesting to me because it is the caregiving experiences of writers. And that is interesting to me because I don't see writing as being such a great differentiator. So many people I know write or people I have known have been writers. They weren't writers of published books but they surely wrote.

Still there is something more peculiarly permanent about a published book than a blog. I could, after all, in the blink of any eye or less delete my entire blog. You can't do that with a published book. Then there is the possibility that someone or several might benefit from the book. I surely did benefit in several ways not the least of which was reading and thinking about other men who are or were caregivers.

These thoughts along with the Kindle make me consider the idea of a book myself so that's certainly a significant thing if nothing else.

Many thanks to Joanne though because I would never have read this one without her review.

My Read of An Uncertain Inheritance - Part 4

An Uncertain Inheritance: Writer’s on Caring for Family edited by Nell Casey

Joanne D. Kiggins in her blog, WritingAfterDark, gave a real review.

I had hoped to only have 4 parts but that's not possible now so I decided to post and finish up with a part 5.

The Vital Role by Amanda Fortini (read February 13, 2008)

I've been really sick only one time in my life where I was so sick that I needed help. I was in the Army and no one cared and no one helped me either so it did not much matter how sick I was or for how long. Once, after I was divorced, I had to have my wisdom teeth removed. Dad and Mom took me to the office and then brought me home. They offered to stay but I just crawled in bed and when the weekend was over I crawled out of bed and I knew that beforehand and told them to go on home and they did. Another time I had an abdominal hernia and was in the hospital for a couple of days. That's kind of different I think and besides I was 10. But really I've never needed or really had anyone be a caregiver for me. I'm not a very good patient either so it's probably a good thing.

Amanda Fortini describes what it was like to be really ill and to need someone to help her. She introduces the enigmatic "J" who becomes a kind of caregiver for her. "J" is not one of my favorite characters right from the start. I prefer my caregivers to be a bit more on the normal and responsible side which is to say not a sociopath. But, I thought to myself, these are New York City folk and perhaps things are just really different there.

I continued reading becoming increasingly fascinated by the description of the illness and the effect it had on the author and imagining myself to be similarly afflicted. I realized how one sided is my brush (is 9 years a brush?) with chronic illness and discomfort and pain and, therefore, how incomplete my own understanding. I wondered if it were possible to really understand the suffering of another person. I think it is not.

Then "J" suggests that if Amanda does not get out of New York City that she will die and I think that's pretty likely true for just about anyone but I've only been there once. But then I know its my own bias about living in such a densely populated place. I am astonished though when I read J's solution is for them both to move to Los Angeles. Inside my mind I was like the guy in the Pace picante commercials except I'm yelling 'Los Angeles" in my head instead of New York City.

I must say that I am familiar with a good deal of J's emotions and reactions towards her self-appointed charge. Not that any of those are particularly flattering but having experienced them myself first hand I recognize their reality. I am respectful of the author's ability to also find them and to write about them. She did a great job observing the caregiver and the loved one.

There is not much that passes for faith. I guess there is none if you omit the vegan and yoga references. There is also no family at all.

I think it is a lonely story.

Planet Autism by Scot Sea (read February 13, 2008)

Sad to say that I understood so well so much of what Scot Sea wrote. His daughter has autism. He does a peculiarly fine job I think of describing the daily grind of caring for her. I suppose I suspected that all mind illnesses might have things in common but actually reading certain of his descriptions and reflecting simultaneously on my own experiences with my Alzheimer's patient was rather sobering. It is funny (strange funny not ha ha funny) what words on paper (or in my case on Kindle) will foment images of past caregiving experiences and then what those images themselves cause to happen emotionally inside the heart and mind.

In my early caregiving days I was lonely and I joined a caregiving email list. Through that list I met a man who, along with his wife, were raising three children with some terrible disease. The children acted out and had many of the autistic symptoms that this author describes. But this disease, and I do not recall its name, was fatal and the children were dying. And it was all the more terrible because it was hereditary and so the parents knew that they had passed it along to their own children. But they didn't find out until after the last child was born. There was a lot of guilt. I wonder about them sometimes. I think the children might be gone now. But those parents were on 24/7/365 and were on welfare, too.

In Sea's account the parents try to work and he does a particularly good job of describing how difficult that is.

There is the story about Holland in this one. Do you all recall it from Alzheimer's? It is more or less like "we're planning a trip to Italy and we study about it and finally go but we end up in Holland and everything we learned is useless and we have to learn a whole new language and culture." I heard it several times in relation to Alzheimer's although I recall now it was said to have originated from autism caregiving.

All I can tell you is that there are some people doing some amazing and heroic things out there.

No faith of any kind here either. Also no mention of extended family. This one and the prior makes me wonder if I am so strangely unique and different to have both faith and family. Or maybe I should say blessed I think.

This story made me so tired. The unending ever repeating part is awful but beautifully conveyed.

The Day the World Spit Open by Abigail Thomas (read February 13, 2008)

This is very well written for me to the point that it was a real page turner (or Kindle button clicker I guess). And again so much of it is familiar to me and I relate so much of it to Alzheimer's even though there are vast differences. But I think I relate everything to Alzheimer's so maybe it is more me than the story.

It is also set in New York City. I wondered if there were no red state authors who had been caregivers. Another thing I related to though was that she had placed an ad in one of those singles deals and Rich had read it and responded and 13 days later they married. She tells about keeping the page that had one circled ad on it. I thought that so brilliantly conveyed so much in such a few words. But I related because when I was lonely I signed up for one of those online services. Plus she was 46 and he was 57 when they met and I appreciated both ages actually.

One day the doorman of their building called (I imagine the image of Jerry Seinfeld's building) to inform her that her dog was in the elevator. She wanted to know where her husband was but he had been in a terrible accident and had brain damage: frontal lobes. We Alzheimer's caregivers know something about frontal lobes.

The operation is successful but there is the soon subsequent inappropriate behavior stage and the pros tell her it is only a stage, oh, and by the way, to expect the recovery to be long and slow. And there are changes of course to be expected but no one knows what. And that also reminded me of Alzheimer's.

So many familiar things to me she writes about. She discusses the heightened sense of detail she notices at all times and how old fears seem no longer significant and wondering where her husband went and the pain of him pushing away her hand in anger and being worried about her little dog on the day of her Rich's surgery and so much else.

There was family in this story but no faith, at least not overtly.

Beautifully written.

The Elephant in the Room by Stan Mack (read February 13, 2008)

Well, we (all of us Alzheimer's caregivers) know about that very same elephant. It is the fact that Alzheimer's is a fatal disease but we never talk about that fact. Some people think it isn't fatal in fact. I've heard them say so.

It is another New York City couple. Janet has cancer and Stan is her companion and lover and caregiver. They come to know that she is going to die but it is not discussed even though it is ever present.

It is awfully nicely written I think and just a lovely story about two people who themselves are rather lovely. They had lots of friends.

Interspersed often are cartoons that convey as much of the story as the words, maybe more in fact. Because Stan is a cartoonist is why the cartoons are there. I liked them. Janet was "a writer of nonfiction books for teenagers." There was something about that statement that struck me as being cute. Maybe it was the great degree of specialization or that I immediately thought to myself "what kind of nonfiction books do teenagers read?"

Stan and Janet never married even though they were together 18 years. He wonders early on if they had married would the marriage vows "in sickness and in health" been any more significant to him. I thought to myself that mere vows themselves make neither husband nor caregiver.

It is a story about living with a progressive illness. It is a glimpse of a caregiver learning to be a caregiver and starting from some place negative of zero. And I related to that. It is also about learning the medical system and all the problems that go with caring for someone who is chronically ill. So much of that I related to immediately. It reminds me of sitting in a valley surrounded by mountains and just over the mountain are an entire ring of cities with all sorts of people that could help but you don't know it because you can't see over the mountains.

No mention of faith.

It is really nice for me as a man to read about other men who are also caregivers.

But a beautiful and rewarding story of love and care.

Kindle and Uncertain Inheritance Update

My Kindle (which I've mentioned a few times now) is proving to be better than I ever imagined.

I have not yet finished reading Uncertain Inheritance but I plan to this week and then write my 4th and final installment of my thoughts on the book.

Yesterday I purchased two more books for my Kindle and the previous day I purchased another two. I think all together now I've purchased 8 books and also had several Microsoft Word documents emailed to it. The last two days I bought books that I had no real reason to buy quickly.

I suppose I should explain that last statement. Sometimes I buy books because I am researching something and I want the material quickly because I need to get up to speed on whatever it is right now. If the book is available for the Kindle this is an easy decision because you just can't get the content sooner.

But other times the titles I want to buy are for reading over a longer period of time or just for the sheer enjoyment of reading. And that's what I ordered this week. But they aren't titles I will treasure forever. They are just titles I want to read and I would like to keep them for a while but not because I want to enjoy seeing them on my bookshelves. (Except I don't really have any bookshelves like that anymore.)

So normally that kind of book purchase would be a paperback edition or even a used volume now since it is so easy to buy used online from various sources. I wouldn't try the library for these titles because they probably wouldn't be there for one thing and you have to take them back to the library.

But when I was ready to buy all my titles were available in Kindle editions. One was $.99 and another was $2.99 and, honestly, I wouldn't have bought either in any other edition. The others were $6.78 and $6.39. The regular prices were, respectively, $14.95 and $7.98. So I saved nearly $10 but I spent $4 I wouldn't have otherwise. The other three purchases I've made for my Kindle saved me about $25.

So I've had the thing about a month or a little better now and I've saved at least $35. If this holds up I'll have paid for the thing in less than one year.

The other really cool thing about it though is that all of my purchases are available for me to download again from Amazon. I see the list in my Media Library. So I can read them and then delete them from my Kindle but Amazon still keeps them for me so I can go back and get them again if I need to for some reason. That's a bonus feature I had never considered.

It is a lot easier to find something, too, on line than having to look around the house for a particular book.

I notice there is a "share" checkbox by each title on my media list. I haven't done this so I'm not sure what it does. Plus I don't know anyone that has a Kindle I could share a title with anyway. Although I am thinking about getting Kindles for my children. I "think" if I did that then maybe they could share some of my titles - maybe not. We all read different stuff anyway so it doesn't make that much difference. But if they had Kindles I could "gift" them titles electronically.

But to get back to my main thought here is that I could have bought hard cover or soft cover books and I decided I wouldn't and bought the Kindle version instead. And mainly I did it because I really like having all my stuff to read in this nice little electronic package.

Another thing I've noticed is that I carry this thing around with me and if I have some waiting time - like before a meeting or something or maybe before Church starts or whatever - I get the thing out and read a bit.

Now I keep reading some of the experts saying this Kindle deal isn't going to make it. But I don't think that's true. I've noticed before that if I like something and use it then often there are a bunch of other people that are doing the same thing. I suspect that's true for the Kindle.

The other thing I want to mention is that I'm seriously thinking about writing something and publishing it as a Kindle version myself. And that's because it is so ridiculously easy to do. Basically you just write something (article, book, short stories, poems, whatever) in one of several formats - I will use HTML - and then you upload it to your Amazon account. In my case my Amazon publishing account is the same as my Amazon consumer account. It is in draft mode at that time. And you can view it yourself and if you want to change it then you just make changes locally and then upload again to overwrite. You do this as often as you want. Then, if you decide you want to sell it in the Kindle store, you put a price on it and hit the publish button and that's all there is to it. Now whether or not someone buys it is a totally different thing.

So why would I want to do that?

That's a very good question and I'm not sure I have a very good answer yet.

For me writing has always been something I do for me and not something I do for someone else. This blog is like that. I write it for myself. I admit it makes me happy that people read it sometimes but I think I'd probably be writing something whether anyone else ever looked at it or not.

Another thing though is that I've been thinking about trying to capture some thoughts and memories and stories and maybe preserve them in a way. Maybe my kids or grandkids or some other future generation would enjoy knowing a little about what it was like for me and my generation. I don't want to spend a lot of money doing it though. And let's face it the chances of selling enough copies of a conventional book to pay for the cost of publishing is about zero to less than none. So the Kindle seems like kind of a nice way.

Just musings about it.

My Read of An Uncertain Inheritance - Part 3

An Uncertain Inheritance: Writer’s on Caring for Family edited by Nell Casey

Joanne D. Kiggins in her blog, WritingAfterDark, gave a real review.

Death in Slow Motion by Eleanor Cooney (read January 30, 2008)

I really enjoyed reading this story. I think at least in part it is because this one was particularly about Alzheimer's. The mother is the loved one in this story and the daughter and her "mate" are the primary caregivers with help from a brother.

More particularly I guess it is her ability to write about the symptoms and the behaviors and her feelings and actions as well as her mate's. I've highlighted a good many passages. I will share a few:

"Take time out for yourself, they chant. Time out for yourself? I'll let you in on a secret. There is no time out, not even when you are sound asleep."

"Before we knew it, we were financially dependent on her."

"And then there was plenty of good old-fashioned guilt: guilt over dragging my mother away from her home, ... "

"What's the point of fun if you can't remember it."

"Here's an intimate and unhappy fact of senile dementia: They become unappetizing. The don't bathe unless you make them. ... "

"After my mother's arrival we produced 558 dinners on schedule, every night, without fail ... "

Now this last one made me think. I was just 2 months short of 9 years but we had about 3 months in the hospital all together so that's about 103 months or roughly 3,090 days. That's for Dad. I had Mom about 34 months or 1,020 days. That is more than 4,100 suppers, lunches, breakfasts, and snacks. And nearly all of them at the same time every day. Never had thought about it like that.

"If I went and locked myself into the bathroom, she'd go outside, circle around, and tap-tap-tap on the window. Her need for me and her vigilance wore me down, down."

"... she'd been undressing ... and I'd seen the gentle curve of her belly, and when I got home that night after putting her to bed I lay on the floor and wept helplessly for an hour."

There's a lot more good stuff in this one. She's an atheist by the way.

Mourning in Altaic by Ed Bok Lee (read January 30, 2008)

Oh man - another one I really, really liked. Father is the patient in this one. The son is the writer and he does not do all the caregiving but doggone he really does a good job of writing about his father and his father's illness.

I think it is more about a son trying to really understand and come to grips with his father as much as anything.

Here is one amazing exchange between the two that is included:

'"Maybe you could pray," I said. I knew form my mother that his father had been an old-school Confucian, his mother a Buddhist, but his older sister a devout Christian. "I do," he said. "To whom?" I'd gotten used to rubbing his legs without having to ask, the skin astonishingly loose against sharpest bone. "I don't know," he whispered.'

Good read.

Don't Worry, It's Not an Emergency by Susan Lehman (read January 30, 2008)

I liked this one, too. Mother is loved one and daughter is caregiver and moves her mother from Toledo to New York City.

It is the description of the characters in this one that I love so much. I think it's impossible to make up stuff like this. And the interaction of the children with their grandmother is astonishingly wonderful for me.

In The Land of Little Girls by Ann Hood (read January 30, 2008)

Oh my! I cried reading this one. I've been in the hospital with my children. I've been in the hospital with loved ones who nearly died and who did die.

You must prepare yourself before reading this one but it is a must. I am not going to add more because it is just too powerful.

My Read of An Uncertain Inheritance - Part 2

An Uncertain Inheritance: Writer’s on Caring for Family edited by Nell Casey

Joanne D. Kiggins in her blog, WritingAfterDark, gave a real review.

The Kindle is really a great way to carry around a little library. I have this tendency to have several books under way at one time and this is kind of a nice way to have them with me all the time in a really small footprint. One thing that would be nice though would be a way to hide books already read. Maybe there is and I haven't found it. I guess I could delete the book because Amazon keeps a copy of the book online for you. I guess forever. Another thing would be to go directly to a bookmark if only one exists for a certain book instead of always seeing the list of bookmarks first.

Caring Across Borders: Aging Parents in Another County by Julia Alvarez (read January 28, 2008)

This story has elements that will be familiar to many caregivers. It is the story first and foremost of a family. There are four daughters and there are sibling issues but not so terrible. There's an older parent with Alzheimer's. There's a caregiver parent with medical problems herself. There's the daughters' husbands and children and careers and all the normal things of modern American life. The daughter's ages will be familiar, too.

And then there's the added elements of distance and culture and nationality. Because the parents move to the Dominican Republic from New York City right at the beginning.

There is also family loyalty that is exceedingly strong. It is something I understand and it is uniquely distinctive to this story.

Also I suspect the dynamics of 4 daughters is distinctive. The author even compares her own sisters with Little Women so it must have been prominent in her mind as well. It recalled me for my own mother's 3 sisters as they cared for both their father and their mother. In many ways the birth order issues were familiar to me.

One thread that I found interesting was the author's request of her parents for a benediction upon each parting. It is something she says she never would have requested when she was younger but it became important to her on the first parting and remained so afterwards. Perhaps it had something to do with faith but seemed more family cultural to me.

Did I like this one? Yes, I did like it. I liked this family and I liked reading about them and how they loved and cared for each other. I found inspiration with everyone of them.

I continue to wonder about the absence of faith in these stories. I find it so strange but it does remind me of most of the novels I read where no one prays and no one goes to church and only the nuts are religious. Or maybe it is me and where I live is so different than the rest of the world. Because here one's faith is just a part of everyday life.

Called Them Vitamins by Stephen Yadzinski (read January 28, 2008)

This is a very well written story that I found terribly sad. There's not a scintilla of evidence of faith anywhere that I saw just to cover that point up front.

I was interested immediately in this story because the parents were both musicians playing at symphony level. I find that interesting now because of my own Judy's playing. I thought at first that the mother might have Alzheimer's but it was the father that was ill and his illness would have been a good subject for Mystery Diagnosis.

The parents divorce and the mother moves to Atlanta while the symptoms are nearly missing. The divorce isn't explained but the boys long for home in Buffalo with dad and eventually find their way back.

Dad's symptoms worsen as the boys grow into young men. At the same time Dad's desire for independence increases. This strikes a chord with me for sure and I also know it will for many of my caregiver friends. There are other chords, too. One is about getting up in the middle of the night to pick dad up off the floor of the downstairs kitchen. Another is about all the things that the writer does to help his dad.

I thought the caregiving was too much for someone so young. And it was.

Oh, the vitamins are pain pills. The father calls them vitamins. The son has to open the containers for dad and places them in his brief case pockets.

No, I didn't like this one. It is a sad tale of sad people doing sad things and having sad things happen to them. Sad.

Ruth by Justine Picardie (read January 28, 2008)

There are some references to faith in this one early one: "... the disease ... was ... immune to prayers or pleas or medicine or miracles." It's a stretch I know.

This is a story about two sisters. One becomes ill and requires care and dies in the end. The other is the writer and she tells about the love she and her sister shared. She says up front that she is not sure she should be called a carer. But we, that is me and my caregiver friends, would all include her as a caregiver in our group.

She talks about some of the lesser discussed things of caregiving that she helped bring to the situation. Things like scheduling and transportation and paperwork and money and food her sister enjoyed and laughter. She says her sister taught her that "small pleasures can be as precious at the end of life as the big stuff." I liked that.

And she talks some about her "many failures" for which she still feels shame. I and my friends all know that one.

There's a place she writes about "other people's expressions of misery about her illness" and "ones who used to behave as if nothing was wrong, or tell her not to worry, their aunt's friend has survived breast cancer." We all know those feelings, too.

One unexpected part of this story is the sister's "disinhibited behavior"caused by a brain tumor. The chief symptom was rage. And there's a place at the end where she wants to give her sister her own strength but couldn't. All too familiar I think.

The end of the story includes hospice and pain and morphine and a lot of love and death.

I liked this story very much.

One thing I disagreed a little with was a statement near the end: "Because that's one of the things you learn about caring: it's huge, but it doesn't work miracles, despite being miraculously limitless." Caregiving is huge and it does not work miracles itself. But in my own caregiving I experienced so many miracles I really couldn't write them all. I don't mean I had anything to do with them but had God withheld His miracles from me I would not have survived. And my caregiving was not limitless. In fact I found my limits to be absurdly narrower than I first thought. Again it was God Who got me through.

This is a really sweet story, especially for sisters.

Notes on Accepting Care by Andrew Solomon (read January 28, 2008)

No faith in this story.

It's about the writer's depression and his own father's care for him during this particularly bad time. At the start there's a part about his mother's illness and his own role in caring for her and the way he felt about his father and his mother and himself. Really good treatment of depression which I suppose is not surprising given the author's credentials.

One thing that bothered me a little was his admission that he really resented his father's asking him for help with his mother during her illness. He was 25 then. That's younger than my son but I wonder if my son resents my asking and expecting and getting his help during my own parents' illnesses. I think my son was okay with it but this essay made me wonder about it.

He describes his father's "lack of ambivalence" regarding the care of his wife and the author's mother. The father wasn't ambivalent about taking care of his son later on either. That struck me though because that's the way my dad was and I remember thinking about that early on when I came to live with my parents.

Liked the father in this one a lot. Liked the writing.

The Baby by Anne Landsman (read January 28, 2008)

She's the baby of the family. The family is one of those where the parents squabble but hang together and there's very little expression of affection and love. She and her siblings leave South Africa for the United States and her parents remain. Her father is a country doctor and her mother manages the practice.

There is religion in this story. They are Jewish for one thing and then a Jesuit Priest plays an important part towards the end. I find no faith here.

I think it is a story that deals with the struggle of relationship between a child and parent and a child and aging parents and finally a child and a dying parent. And there's a "sandwich" issue that I found important and touching.

I did like it and I find it troubling in a way. I'm not sure exactly why it is troubling but it and the previous one kind of hang with me right now.

My Read of An Uncertain Inheritance - Part 1

An Uncertain Inheritance: Writer’s on Caring for Family edited by Nell Casey

Joanne D. Kiggins in her blog, WritingAfterDark, gave a real review.

I wouldn't have purchased this book except for the fact that Joanne reviewed it. And when I looked on Amazon it was available in a Kindle edition and I'm really into my Kindle right now. But I am not a good book reviewer and really don't enjoy doing such things. I don't particularly want to be objective about it and I think objectivity is required for a good review. So I'll leave the real reviewing to Joanne.

But I thought it might be an interesting topic for my blog and kind of keep me posting for a while. I decided I would read the book chapter by chapter and then write about my own deeply subjective feelings about the material and about the subject of caregiving from my own perspective. So this isn't really a review but more of a written account of my experience of reading this book.It's going to take more than one post, too, so that's why I'm doing parts. Still there are 21 chapters including the foreword and the introduction so I'm going to try to cover at least 5 in each of my reviews.

You may think I am harsh and critical about some of these. I do not mean it to be so. I am not saying that the work is unimportant or insignificant or even that I did not benefit in some way. Rather it is about my feeling from the reading.

foreword by Frank McCourt (read January 24, 2008)

I didn't know who Frank McCourt was so I had to look him up and that's why I linked his name to the Wiki article. I remembered him when I read the article. I didn't like Angela's Ashes very much when I read it. My daughter did though and she gave a copy to me not long after I came to live with Mom and Dad and begin my caregiving. So maybe it was the time I tried to read it as much as it was the book itself.

He begins by recounting a story of his youth, or childhood more properly, when he delivered telegrams to a hospice and how curious he was about death and dying. Try as I might I could not really appreciate this story. I suppose I was the odd child out because I never had the curiosity about death and dying that McCourt recounts. I say "odd child out" though because I recognize that a lot of kids did then and now do.

He continues that this book made him continuously recall memories like that from his past. "There are, I think, two great themes in this book: suffering and heroism" he writes. He concludes that there is heartbreak, humor, dignity, and grace to be found in this book and at the end "you'll want to stand and cheer."

At the time I'm writing this I've only managed the first essay and I'm hoping further reading will make me feel that way because I certainly don't now, that is stand and cheer.

I did notice that Mr. McCourt's foreword is dated January 17, 2007. So I began reading this book 1 year and 1 week to the day afterward. That's 3 days after the 5th month anniversary of my Dad's death, too.

introduction by Nell Casey (read January 24, 2008)

Just in case you're wondering I am using the lower case on tine "foreword" and "introduction" because that's the way it is printed in the book.

And, yes, I searched for Nell Casey. I probably will search or have already every name I find. I seem to do that a lot now I notice. I figure if I do it then others do it as well.

This introduction could very well be a review of the entire book. There are several paragraphs that are just beautifully written and worth reading just for the sake of reading the words if not the material itself. I especially like the first paragraph and the last. In between is mixed with things about each of the succeeding chapters or essays and data about numbers of caregivers and things like that.

The introduction concludes with "We endure." I intend to but I hope the process of reading becomes less about endurance and more about enjoyment or at least inspiration. But maybe that's too much to ask for such material.

My Father the Garbage Head by Helen Schulman (read January 24, 2008)

In the actual book - well I don't have the actual book but I have the Kindle version of the actual book - this title is also in lower case. But it seems unnatural for me to continue that so I'm back to my own scheme which is capitalizing the titles. This way I don't have to try to remember what I'm doing. And so now you know something not necessarily flattering about me.

This essay is emotional and comes across as brutally honest and straight forward. That said though I didn't like this essay very much. It is not a tribute either to Ms. Schulman's father or herself for that matter. Nell Casey says that this essay is a "... criticism of the tendency to idealize the caregiver." With all due respect I don't see it that way although I do agree that there is a tendency to idealize the caregiver and I also agree that this essay in no way does that.

I've read this one now three times. I've tried to like it. I like Ms. Schulman's writing but I don't much like this material.

I never really felt connected to Ms. Schulman or her father or the family. There were things I connected with to be sure. I guess I'm trying to say that I could never quite relate my own caregiving experience with hers or her father's death with my father's death or my mother's death or the death of anyone in my family really.

I was trying to understand why I feel this way and that caused the multiple reads. Usually I would not subject myself to more displeasure with reading.

I have a few answers I think. At first I wondered if it was entirely the early revelation that her father was an atheist and terrified of death. This didn't really startle me exactly but I think it did flavor the rest of the material on the first read. Atheism is not terribly comforting about death and I know that first hand because I was one for a good many years. It isn't as discomforting as one might think however. In fact I could argue and did that the great nothingness after death was better than any potential eternal torment. And there's even something rather admirable about someone clinging to a deeply held belief even in the face of death. But there's something peculiarly selfish and unsympathetic and unheroic about it, too. I think it is the selfishness that bothered me most.

Then there was the part about love. She writes about telling her father that she would love him and be there for him. And he tells her that her love really will not help him. Here again I understood what she believed he meant and I even appreciated it. Also again the selfishness bothered me.

Then there is the entire thing about killing him. That bothered me. And there is more about the mother. And that bothered me. And I understood both things.

But I think none of these things were the most important factor.

I think it was the blogs I read and have been reading a while now, that is, the blogs of my fellow caregiver friends. Some of us have experienced one or more deaths of our loved ones. Some of us are still caregiving. I think I connect more with them though because of the regular posts we all make and read. I think that is too hard to do in a single, brief essay. Maybe if I had been reading Ms. Schulman's blog for a while and had gone through the thing with her I would have more connection. Maybe blogging has just changed forever my expectation of books.

Now let me say that this essay is worth reading for a number of reasons. But if I had to choose only one it would be the incredibly vivid description of her father's death. This is one powerful account. I would read the essay again just for this account.

I did not enjoy this essay but I am glad I read it. I am slogging onward. I can't spend this much time writing about these chapters or I'm never going to get done.

The Gift by Sam Lipsyte (read January 27, 2008)

Lipsyte's title comes from a statement that someone made to him about his caregiving for his mother. He writes that his first impulse was to strike the person. He admits that he thought there might be a tiny bit of hidden truth in the assertion. The end of the essay comes full circle actually (as any good essay should - we still use chiasmus I guess). He still doesn't think it was much of a gift and says so.

Just like the first essay there were several things to which I could easily relate. Lipsyte was living with his mother because his own life was in shambles and she was giving him a chance to start over. I relate to that except that my own shambles was already in the process of being reclaimed and I felt caregiving was a huge interruption. At least I felt that way at first. And I understand the resentment about the gift talk. Except that I did come to understand the enormity of the gift I had been blessed to receive.

I wonder if one of the requirements for writing an essay for this book is to be a person without faith. And maybe to write exclusively from a selfish perspective. Except for a few paragraphs that the writer himself characterizes as being "implausible and sentimental" and "sounding like one of those nurses spouting crap about angels" there is nothing remotely spiritual here except that it is judgmental and derisive to those who do espouse faith.

I did like this essay better than the first one but only marginally.

My Other Husband by Ann Harleman (read January 27, 2008)

This is a sweet and strangely sensual essay and there is love, both physically and emotionally. And there is even a spiritual element albeit subtle.

I related more personally to this story than the previous. Not entirely of course but I was more able to empathize and sympathize with Ms. Harleman. My cousin's husband had MS. And my cousin already had suffered Guillain-Barre for years when they married. About 25 years ago I had a friend who had MS, too. So I knew something about MS and I knew something about spouses who care for each other.

This essay like the others is brutally honest and no holds barred.

Here it is the husband who has MS. I recognize much of what Ms. Harleman writes about his moods and trips to the ER and of their everyday life together. This lady holds my attention. While she makes no effort to paint herself in a positive light, by the end of the essay I hold her with esteem and gratitude.

Unlike the preceding articles I found beauty, love, and inspiration here. I shall read it again.

Elliott by Jerome Groopman (read January 27, 2008)

WOW! What a surprise is this little story. For me it was riveting and suspenseful. For one thing it was such a different perspective than one I could myself imagine. And I mean that both from the point of view of the friend and the loved one.

I loved the ending which is a wonderful Psalm. I shall write no more about it but I loved this essay.