Living in Limbo: Creating Structure and Peace When Someone You Love is Ill

The moment a loved one is diagnosed with a serious illness or disability, your world changes. Every assumption you had about the future vanishes. Your plans are replaced with doubt, fear, and anxiety. You’re plunged into limbo, into a state of constant uncertainty.

Living in Limbo: Creating Structure and Peace When Someone You Love Is Ill offers hope for caregivers. This book is a useful resource of coping strategies and behavioral changes you can make as you take on the mantle of caregiver.

For Laura Michaels, her life changed instantly when her husband Bill was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer. A wife and working mother of three, Laura was devastated but couldn’t let her grief and shock stop her from functioning. She needed to adapt and respond to her new reality. Although Laura’s experience was with cancer, the philosophical and practical approaches discussed here are applicable for anyone supporting a loved one with an acute or chronic illness, or physical or mental disability.

Backing up Michael’s intensely personal story are the observations of her coauthor, psychiatrist Claire Zilber, MD. Claire’s contributions include clinical commentary as well as helpful anecdotes of her work with patients and family members.

Laura Michaels, MA, JD, earned her undergraduate degree from Oberlin College. She received her law degree from the University of Denver, and her MA in counseling from Regis University.

A professional counselor in private practice, Ms. Michaels spent twenty years as the executive director of the Colorado Psychiatric Society (CPS). She was a founding member of the Colorado Behavioral Health Partnership and served on local and national mental health committees through the American Psychiatric Association (APA).

Claire Zilber, MD, received her BA in psychology from Haverford College, her medical degree from Thomas Jefferson University, and her psychiatric training at the University of Colorado. She also graduated from the psychodynamic psychotherapy program at the Denver Institute for Psychoanalysis.

Dr. Zilber is in private practice. She is also a clinical assistant professor in the University of Colorado's psychiatry department. She has written articles for CPS and APA publications, and she is on the faculty of the Professional/Problem-Based Ethics program at the Center for Personalized Education for Physicians.