Enduring: A Story of Love, Dementia, and Lessons Learned

One wife’s story of caring for her husband with dementia—and the lessons for caregivers she learned along the way.

After the death of her husband, author Donna Larkin realized that she—and the other women in her dementia caregivers’ support group—had accumulated invaluable strategies and tools that might be helpful for others recently finding themselves in a similar situation. In Enduring: A Story of Love, Dementia, and Lessons Learned, Larkin shares a chronology of her husband’s Alzheimer’s disease and her caregiving approaches, including those gleaned from her support-group friends and experts she met along the way.

An honest, loving, and unflinching portrait of caregiving, Enduring draws on nine years’ worth of notes, emails, and journal pages written while full-time caregiving at home and while later helping to transition her husband into a memory-care facility. A chronicle of the couple’s journey from diagnosis to passing, her stories—with vulnerability, straight talk, and good humor—uniquely illustrate what it means to be a full-time caregiver for a loved one with Alzheimer’s disease.

As Larkin and her husband faced down the realities of his condition, a problem-solving approach kept her focused on finding solutions where possible—while her heart kept her focused on the man she knew her husband to be and the love they still shared in the face of many obstacles. For anyone struggling with the realities of a loved one’s battle with dementia, Enduring is a reminder that you are not alone.