"Slow Dancing with a Stranger": A New Memoir About Alzheimer's Caregiving

I highly recommend an unflinching new memoir about dementia caregiving:  “Slow Dancing with a Stranger: Lost and Found in the Age of Alzheimer’s” by Meryl Comer (HarperOne, September 2014). Few Alzheimer’s memoirs are this honest about the challenges of long-term dementia care, or as moving as a call to action for better dementia care and more funding for Alzheimer’s research.

Emmy-award-winning broadcast journalist Meryl Comer shows us the devastating cost—personal and financial—of caring for loved ones with this progressive disease, a disease which can require long-term care for ten to 20 years or more.  Comer is president and CEO of the Geoffrey Beene Foundation Alzheimer’s Initiative, a nonprofit which supports awareness, diagnosis and research of the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, and she is also a co-founder of Women Against Alzheimer’s. Comer’s husband, Dr. Harvey Gralnick, was chief of hematology and oncology at the National Institutes of Health until he received a diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease at age 58. Comer’s mother, who also has Alzheimer’s disease, lives with Comer and her husband.

Meryl ComerAs often happens, the first signs of her husband’s early-onset Alzheimer’s were not memory lapses but uncharacteristic behavior and angry outbursts. Comer could not figure out what was going on, and her husband was in denial. They suffered several years of misdiagnoses and rebuffs by doctors who refused to accept that this trim, athletic and highly-intelligent man could be sliding into Alzheimer’s at such a young age...

Read the rest of my review on caregivers.com.