Changing Places: A Journey with my Parents into Their Old Age - Softcover

Kramer, Judy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 157322880X ISBN 13: 9781573228800

Publisher: Riverhead Books, 2001

Synopsis

Millions of baby boomers are facing one of life's most poignant challenges-they are becoming parents to their parents.

It is a turning point that Mary Pipher illuminated in her New York Times bestseller Another Country-and one that Judy Kramer knows well. Confronted with new emotional and practical challenges when her parents entered a nursing home, she navigated through a maze of medical bills and paperwork, gained valuable insight from visits with doctors and consultations with elder law attorneys, and found love for her parents in new and often surprising places. It was a difficult journey, and a lonely one. In Changing Places, a book based on her popular newspaper column, she shares what she learned along the way.

About this title

About the Author

Judy Kramer is a journalist who writes for The Gazette newspaper in the Washington, D.C., area. Largely as a result of her columns about her parents' aging, Kramer has become a de facto public advocate for education about, and improvement of, elder care in this country. She lives in Silver Springs, Maryland.

From Publishers Weekly

Beginning as a series of newspaper columns recording how she cared for her parents, Kramer's work blossomed into a poignant book that plumbs the depths of love, loss and the ties that bind. "At times, traveling with my parents into their old age has felt like a forced march," she observes. "Often I have not wanted to go. But it gives me great satisfaction that we have dealt with the roadblocks, followed the detours, found the route, and made the trip together." The core of Kramer's book charts the course of their intertwined lives, from the point she began taking over the caregiver roleAmanaging her parents' finances, driving them to doctors' appointments, helping them move to a nursing home and so on, all while working full-time and caring for her own familyAthrough their deaths within two months of each other and the unexpected difficulties she had navigating the shoals of grief. Along the way, Kramer had to learn everything from what a durable power of attorney is to how to deal with bureaucratic complications, negotiate the vagaries of medicaid, step back when her parents made choices she felt weren't the wisest and find innovative ways to make their lives more comfortable (such as using a music stand to stabilize books that shaky hands could no longer hold). Kramer shares her frustrations and triumphs with candor; her memoir should resonate with anyone facing similar experiences. (Sept.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Riverhead Books
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 157322880X
• ISBN 13: 9781573228800
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256