Slow Dancing with a Stranger

I have just begun reading a book by Meryl Comer about her life caring for her husband, who had early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. It offers an intimate look at the process of discovery of the disease, its progress toward dementia, and the life of caregiving. It is heartbreaking and informative.

I have not finished it yet, but what I have read so far, about the course of events during onset, is a revealing look at the toll that the disease takes on the loved ones of the patient. Reading about the wife’s struggle to understand and adapt to her husband’s dementia is difficult for me. Her experiences were sometimes exactly like mine, and those of other caregivers in a support group I have attended for years. Reliving those memories is painful.

Slow Dancing With a Stranger: Lost and Found in the Age of Alzheimer’s

Meryl Comer, 2014, Harper One