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    A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents---And Ourselves
    A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents---And Ourselves
    A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents---And Ourselves
    Audiobook15 hours

    A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents---And Ourselves

    Written by Jane Gross

    Narrated by Kate Reading

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    In telling the intimate story of caring for her aged and ailing mother, Jane Gross offers indispensable, and often surprising, advice for the rapidly increasing number of adult children responsible for aging parents.

    Gross deftly weaves the specifics of her personal experience-a widowed mother with mounting health problems, the attendant collision of fear and ignorance, the awkward role reversal of parent and child, unresolved family relationships with her mother and brother, the conflict between her day job and caregiving-with a comprehensive resource for effectively managing the lives of one's own parents while keeping sanity and strength intact.

    Packed with information, A Bittersweet Season explains which questions to ask when looking for a nursing home or assisted living facility; how to unravel the mysteries of Medicare and Medicaid; why finding a new general practitioner should always be the first move when relocating an elderly parent; how to weigh quality against quantity of life when considering medical interventions; why you should always keep a phone charger and an extra pair of glasses in your car; and much more. It also provides astute commentary on a national health care system that has stranded two generations to fend for themselves at this most difficult of times.

    No less important are the lessons of the human spirit that Gross learned in the last years of her mother's life, and afterward, when writing for the New York Times and The New Old Age, a blog she launched for the newspaper. Calling upon firsthand experience and extensive reporting, Gross recounts a story of grace and compassion in the midst of a crisis that shows us how the end of one life presents a bittersweet opportunity to heal old wounds and find out what we are made of.

    Wise, unflinching, and ever helpful, A Bittersweet Season is an essential guide for anyone navigating this unfamiliar, psychologically demanding, powerfully emotional, and often redemptive territory.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateApr 26, 2011
    ISBN9781452672090
    A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents---And Ourselves

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    Reviews for A Bittersweet Season

    4.5/5

    25 ratings7 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Frightening! This is essential reading for everyone age 45 and older. Jane Gross' well written book may make you sad. However, when you finish reading her devastating, difficult saga and her thoughtfully outlined guidance, you will be glad you read her story -- and you will be a great deal smarter. Your having that knowledge may prove to be very fortunate for you, your children, your parents, your best friend, your "families of origin" as well as your "families of choice." (page 115) A Bittersweet Season is an important book that addresses significant issues facing all of us today.
    • 4/5
      Eye-opening in many ways, this book is somewhat repetitive if read straight through because of many of the chapters' being written originally as a blog, but extremely informative and unsentimental. The scariest passage for me was this: "It's heresy, I know, to tell friends, colleagues, blog readers, and the like that a parent over eighty-five is not likely to die quickly, easily, or without full-time assistance with the activities of daily living. The data confirming this fact, however, are compelling and uncontested by the experts. Deny that data and make avoiding a nursing home your goal, and the odds are you will subject your parent to excessive, pointless, and damaging relocations. That was the case with my mother."
    • 5/5
      This book is an invaluable guide for those who find that they have become caretakers for a relative or friend who can no longer care for themselves. The knowledge and the insights are both professional and personal. Ms. Gross is the founder of the New York Times' "New Old Age" blog, and -- before it became personally relevant to her -- knew a whole lot more about aging in the U.S. than most of us do. But it is the personal that dominates. After her 85 year old mother suddenly needed help (lots of help) she found that there was a great deal she didn't know, and a host of unpleasant things she had to learn. Having had a similar experience, I only wish that I had read this book sooner, rather than midway through the process of arranging someone else's new and diminished life. In my case the person who needed help wasn't a parent, it was a dear friend with ovarian cancer and a traumatic brain injury and no contact with her family. But the many of the problems are the same, though the emotional impact is doubtless far less. Many other reviewers have listed Ms. Gross most important pieces of advice, but the one I most wish I had known early on is -- FIND A DOCTOR WHO WILL BE IN CHARGE. My fellow caregiver and I spent a massive amount of time trying to deal with miscommunication between doctors, trying to make sure that our friend was getting all the care she needed, and trying to be sure that her basic needs were attended to. As so many have said, most of the individuals we dealt with were reasonable, professional, caring people. But the system that is supposed to link them together doesn't work. This means that you, the caregiver, must do so. If you can't, as we could not indefinitely, finding a skilled and responsible care manager can be a godsend. But it's not cheap.A final note: as one goes though the caregiving experience, and as one reads this book, it becomes increasingly clear that there are very good odds that one (really!) will become the care-givee oneself, or that one's spouse will do so, or that both will! This has made me think about some very hard-edged choices that I may have to make in the not-too-distant future. Best not to be taken by surprise. In this sense, as well as in others, this book is a godsend.
    • 5/5
      I wish I had read this book sooner. Jane Gross details her and her brother’s experiences with her aging mother. Their story is both sweet and bitter. Gross describes the tender moments and does not avoid the unpleasant ones. Somehow, she manages to do that while letting through the humor that her family shared during those years. Gross also manages to put in lots of details about things as varied as the intricacies of spending down money to become eligible for Medicaid, the legal issues of parents in another state, and the flaws in how our medical system treats disease. Gross is Jewish and notes that the Bible does not describe the long slow path to death that most elderly now experience. Much of what she writes was familiar to me such as the chapter on therapeutic fibs—the little lies we end up telling our parents to get through awkward situations. That might mean telling your parent that a drug helps enhance appetite rather than that it is an antidepressant because the parent is of an age that does not acknowledge the existence of depression. After all, they lived through the real Depression. I have lived, and am living, through much of what she describes with my father and now my mother. I really wish I had known in advance about more of what she relates in her book. I recommend this book to anyone who has aging parents, especially ones still in good health. That will change at some point and the farther in advance you can prepare for that change, the better.
    • 5/5
      Excerpted [with some paraphrasing] from the book's section on a geriatrician’s presentation to healthcare policymakers:“How many of you expect to die?”[All members of the audience eventually raised their hands.]“Would you prefer to be old when it happens?”All hands flew up in unison.Who would choose cancer as the way to go?Just a few.“What about chronic heart failure or emphysema?”A few more.“So all the rest of you are up for frailty and dementia?”This outstanding book -- part memoir, part instruction manual, part expose on eldercare and financing -- is a sort of documentary about that third route. Cancer deaths come relatively early (age mid-60s) and with a rapid decline for 20% of Americans, and organ failures follow a decade later, via lengthier up-and-down declines, for another 25%. But it’s frailty and dementia -- “a drawn-out and humiliating series of losses for the parent and an exhausting and potentially bankrupting ordeal for the family” -- that lead to 40% of deaths.The topic may be heavy but the treatment is extremely readable, accessible (suspenseful and fascinating, even), and packed with useful information. New York Times writer Jane Gross uses her mother’s decline as a springboard to present statistics and discuss issues, for example:• elder housing (“assisted living is a social, rather than a medical, model of long-term care”);• elder care (home care, nursing homes, physicians, hospitalizations);• private savings and public financing (“assume that whatever it is you need, Medicare won’t pay for it”);• family relationships and responsibilities• end of life.Gross gathers dozens of resources into a useful appendix, and the blog she launched (The New Old Age at the NYT) remains active although with new contributors. Her mother’s 2001 decline prompted this book, but Gross incorporated up-to-date research when she wrote it in 2010. It was published when my 92-year-old mother was a couple of years into her decline into frailty, and I read it in a cycle of putting it aside and then invariably being fascinated to find recognition and comfort when I picked it up again; I finished it a month before she died.Of the many books now about caregiving and elder care, I recommend this single volume. It’s one to read for your parents’ aging and then again for your own.(Review based on an advance reading copy provided by the publisher.)
    • 5/5
      We are all in this book together. All of us need to read and absorb what Jane Gross elaborates in detail about all of the aspects of her Mother's dying process. This book is a tremendous resource, full of the factual and emotional aspects surrounding the death of anyone of us, including ourselves. Although it reads like a gripping novel, it is all too real---actuality beats imagination again.
    • 5/5
      Caring for one aging parent or in-law for an extended number of years can be, and usually is, a tremendous physical and mental burden on the caretaker. But these days, when more and more of us are living beyond our capability of taking care of ourselves, some caretakers find themselves caring for two, three, or even four elderly relatives. I, for instance, have been primarily responsible for my 89-year-old father’s care for the past eighteen months – and just when his health has stabilized these past few weeks, my mother-in-law is struggling with dementia issues that require my wife’s daily attention.Jane Gross, author of A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents – and Ourselves, has been there. Gross, with some help from her brother, was her mother’s caretaker for almost three years, from the time the siblings moved their mother from Florida back to New York so that she would be closer to them, until they finally buried her in 2003. Gross’s story is somewhat unusual in that her mother made the decision for herself when it was time to go. Effectively, with the understanding of her two children beforehand, she committed suicide by refusing to take in any more food and water. The important message of the book, however, is what happened between her move to New York and her death.The first lesson Gross learned is that neither she, nor her mother, were at all prepared for what was ahead of them, starting with the role-reversal that required Jane Gross to become her mother’s mother. She also faced the question of how a family can get through the end-crisis of a parent without forever damaging the relationships of the siblings left behind? As Gross points out, the caretaker (usually female) can hardly be expected to endure the experience without building deep-seated resentment of the siblings whom her efforts allow to go on with the routines of their own lives.Gross offers tips, and details, about dealing with all the forms and regulations of Medicare and Medicaid, two programs almost impossible to understand and deal with effectively without the help of third party advisers. The chapters dealing with these two Federal programs, and how to best use them to the patient’s advantage, are alone worth the price of A Bittersweet Season. But perhaps the most unnerving chapter in the book is the one pertaining to “hospital and emergency room delirium” among the elderly population. For reasons that no one can really explain, approximately one-third of patients over the age of seventy will experience such hospital-induced delirium. This delays scheduled procedures and requires the extra attention of the hospital staff and patient families – adding significantly to the cost of the hospital stay.Bad enough, but the real tragedy is that only 4 percent of these patients are back to normal at the time of their discharge, with another 18 percent fully recovered at six months from the date of discharge. It appears that many of those not recovered within six months will never fully do so because the early-stage dementia they entered the hospital with (of which most are blissfully unaware) has been “unmasked” and accelerated by their hospitalization. (This, I am convinced, explains my mother-in-law’s sudden and rapid descent into dementia, while my father recovered from the symptoms within 6 weeks of discharge.)A Bittersweet Season is an important book for those who are already in the midst of taking care of a helpless parent – and for those who see themselves approaching that situation. I wish this book had been available two years ago, before I became totally immersed in my father’s healthcare and financial wellbeing. It would have helped prepare me for what was to come. On the other hand, even though I learned the hard way much of what Gross writes about, it is still comforting to be reminded that I am not alone; a rapidly growing army of us is going through the same thing. Read this book – for the good of your parents, and yourself.Rated at: 5.0