Travelers To Unimaginable Lands

What happens when a person with a healthy brain cares for someone with dementia? These deeply compassionate, beautifully observed case studies illuminate what's at work in this uniquely confounding, symbiotic relationship.

Dasha Kiper was twenty-five and getting her master's in clinical psychology when she took a leave of absence and began to look after a Holocaust survivor with middle-stage Alzheimer's. For a year, she lived with the emotional strain of caregiving, learning firsthand how disorienting and painful it can be to live with a person whose condition blatantly disregards the rules of time, order, and continuity. She decided to become a counselor for other caregivers, and this book reflects her ten years helping people who are going through this process.

In these poignant but unsentimental stories of parents and children, husbands and wives, Kiper dispels the myth of the perfect caregiver. Relying on a wide breadth of cognitive and neurological research as well as personal experience and borrowing from philosophy and literature, Kiper explores the existential dilemmas created by this disease: a man believes his wife is an imposter; a woman's imaginary friendships with famous authors drive a wedge between her and her devoted husband; another woman's childhood trauma emerges to torment her son; a man's sudden, intense Catholic piety provokes his wife. As painful as these conflicts are for caregivers, resolving them has its own cost. In order to find peace, they need to walk an impossibly fine line between acknowledging what the disease has taken from someone they love and recognizing what it has left.

Frustration and conflict are as intrinsic to these relationships as love and hope. This is a powerful, illuminating portrait of humanity and the terrible pressure dementia places on our strongest bonds.