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Summary
Summary
When we promise "in sickness and in health," it may be a mercy that we don't know exactly what lies ahead. Forcing food on an increasingly recalcitrant spouse. Brushing his teeth. Watching someone you love more than ever slip away day by day. As her husband James's Parkinson's disease with eventual dementia began to progress, writer Susan Allen Toth decides she intensely wants to keep her husband at home--the home he designed and loved and lived in for a quarter century--until the end.
No saint, as she often reminds the reader, Toth found solace in documenting her days as a caregiver. The result, written in brief, episodic bursts during the final eighteen months of James's life, has a rare and poignant immediacy. Wrenching, occasionally peevish, at times darkly funny, and always deeply felt, Toth's intimate, unsparing account reflects the realities of seeing a loved one out of life: the critical support of some friends and the disappearance of others; the elasticity of time, infinitely slow and yet in such short supply; the sheer physicality of James's decline and the author's own loneliness; the practical challenges--the right food, the right wheelchair, the right hospital bed--all intricately interlocking parts of the act of loving and caring for someone who in so many ways is fading away.
"We all need someone to hear us," Toth says of the millions who devote their days to the care of a loved one. Her memoir is at once an eloquent expression of that need and an opening for others. No Saints around Here is the beginning of a conversation in which so many of us may someday find our voices.
Author Notes
Susan Allen Toth has written for the New York Times , the Washington Post , Harper's , and Vogue , among other publications. Her many books include Blooming , Ivy Days , My Love Affair with England , England As You Like It , and Leaning into the Wind: A Memoir of Midwest Weather (Minnesota, 2006). A longtime teacher and writer-in-residence at Macalester College, Toth currently divides her time between rural Wisconsin and La Jolla, California.
Reviews (1)
Kirkus Review
A wife's frank memoir of her time as a caregiver during the last 18 months of her husband's life. Writing teacher Toth (Leaning into the Wind: A Memoir of Midwest Weather, 2003, etc.), whose husband, James, had Parkinson's disease, tells it like it is. Once a successful architect, he declined both physically and mentally as the disease ravaged his body. The author was determined to care for him at home in the house he had designed for them, the story of which is told in their jointly authored book, A House of One's Own (1991). During those last months, Toth jotted down her thoughts, feelings and uncertainties, and she recorded the intimate details of caring for a helpless person. Arranged in chronological order, these short essays tell of a dark journey through slow decay and toward inevitable death. Caregivers do not just soothe fevered brows; they have to brush and floss their patients' teeth, feed them, find the right commode, diapers, and waterproof mattress pads, clean up their messes and cope with their demands. They do what has to be done. While Toth makes it clear that she dearly loved the man she was caring for, she lets her fatigue, guilt, frustrations, fraying patience and even exasperation show. Having paid help is a plus, of course, and the author's financial situation will be the envy of many. The bonds she formed with other caregivers who shared their experiences, sometimes with black humor, were invaluable to her. That may be the book's greatest valuethat caregivers of loved ones reading it will take comfort in knowing that what they are going through has been shared by many others. An inward-looking account with an important take-home message: Caring for a dying loved one is a demanding task, and caregivers are only human.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Table of Contents
| Preface | p. xi |
| Introduction | p. 1 |
| No Saints around Here | p. 29 |
| Together | p. 32 |
| Red Flag in the Mailbox | p. 35 |
| His Cold, My Cold | p. 38 |
| Let Me Count the Ways | p. 42 |
| Failing Battery | p. 47 |
| Sleeping with a Wombat | p. 49 |
| Stuff, Stuff, Stuff | p. 53 |
| Overloaded | p. 57 |
| The Nursing Home on the Hill | p. 59 |
| Teeth Torture Time | p. 65 |
| Time on the Tundra | p. 69 |
| How Is James? | p. 72 |
| Priorities: Blue Jeans | p. 76 |
| Smiling under Water | p. 78 |
| Beige Lies, Pink Lies, Purple Lies | p. 81 |
| A Very Short Tooth Tale | p. 85 |
| Hanging On | p. 86 |
| Absent Friends | p. 88 |
| No Skipping to the Last Page | p. 98 |
| My Adventures with Gentlemen's Pads | p. 103 |
| The Voice in the Bathroom Cupboard | p. 111 |
| Just a Minute! | p. 113 |
| At the Foot of the Roller Coaster | p. 116 |
| Gravy | p. 123 |
| Home, Alone | p. 128 |
| Through the Hospice Door | p. 132 |
| Time, Again | p. 136 |
| Off the Balance Beam | p. 138 |
| Whatcha Know, Joe? | p. 140 |
| Obsessions | p. 143 |
| The Last Christmas | p. 149 |
| Silver Anniversary | p. 156 |
| The Net Is Larger Than You Imagine | p. 159 |
| An Unexpected Corner of My Net | p. 164 |
| The Long Passage | p. 170 |
| Census Day | p. 176 |
| Living in a Bubble | p. 177 |
| Unmoored | p. 187 |
| The Base Line | p. 190 |
| Vanishing Perspective | p. 194 |
| French Toast | p. 199 |
| Firestorm | p. 203 |
| A Ring among the Ashes | p. 206 |
| Coda | p. 210 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 211 |
