Enduring
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Product Details
Publisher: Ennistymon Press
Release Date: February 27, 2024
Formats: Paperback, Ebook
ISBN: PB: 979-8-9889525-0-3; EB: 979-8-9889525-1-0
Trim: 5.5 x 8.5
Page Count: 248
A Story of Love, Dementia, and Lessons Learned
Donna Larkin
One wife’s story of caring for her husband with dementia—and the lessons for caregivers she learned along the way.
After the death of her husband, author Donna Larkin realized that she—and the other women in her dementia caregivers’ support group—had accumulated invaluable strategies and tools that might be helpful for others recently finding themselves in a similar situation. In Enduring: A Story of Love, Dementia, and Lessons Learned, Larkin shares a chronology of her husband’s Alzheimer’s disease and her caregiving approaches, including those gleaned from her support-group friends and experts she met along the way.
An honest, loving, and unflinching portrait of caregiving, Enduring draws on nine years’ worth of notes, emails, and journal pages written while full-time caregiving at home and while later helping to transition her husband into a memory-care facility. A chronicle of the couple’s journey from diagnosis to passing, her stories—with vulnerability, straight talk, and good humor—uniquely illustrate what it means to be a full-time caregiver for a loved one with Alzheimer’s disease.
As Larkin and her husband faced down the realities of his condition, a problem-solving approach kept her focused on finding solutions where possible—while her heart kept her focused on the man she knew her husband to be and the love they still shared in the face of many obstacles. For anyone struggling with the realities of a loved one’s battle with dementia, Enduring is a reminder that you are not alone.
About the Author
Donna Larkin is a former public affairs writer who earned a master’s degree in education and distance learning. This educational background instilled in her a problem-solving approach to every challenge she has taken on, including caregiving. She grew up in a suburb of New York City and lived in San Francisco and Los Angeles for eight years before establishing a home in Idaho to raise her family. Donna and her husband, Lee, had nearly twenty-five blessed years together before he passed away of Alzheimer’s disease in 2018.
Visit the author’s website at donnalarkin.com
Reviews
“Enduring is both heart-warming and heart-breaking . . . Larkin has written an inviting resource that highlights—and will help readers face—the ups and downs of being a caregiver.” —BookLife Reviews