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Excerpts from Caregiving: The Spiritual Journey

Four excerpts from my book, Caregiving: The Spiritual Journey of Love, Loss, and Renewal (Wiley, 1999 and 2000) are available on my web site.Please click on the links to read the full excerpt.

Caring for Aging Parents:  Chapter 4

"This last month has really been hell, no one but me to make every decision," says Maurene, fifty-six, who gave up sixteen years as a Wall Street analyst to move back to London to be with her dying mother. "The responsibility of taking care of her is enormous. It still scares me. I don't feel equipped in any way to deal with this. I seem to hurtle from one "terror" to the next."

 

The Nature of Loss: Chapter 6

Whether it happens imperceptibly over time or in the flash of crisis, family caregiving refocuses lives, severing those involved from familiar patterns and thrusting them into a land unknown, where human fears prey on the unsuspecting. Yet it is also fertile ground, where detachment from the past allows a new destiny to take root. Seen from the outside, one loss rolls off another. But from within, caregiving can be the life-altering event by which a person shifts direction from linear concerns of the rational mind to the abstract promptings of the inner world, a turning from the ephemera of society to the calling of the soul.