When Heads & Hearts Collide: My Personal Experience in Parenting My Parents is the story of parenting a parent, making the most difficult decision of placing parents in a nursing facility. The book is a personal experience of the guilt and stress encountered in caring for parents who could not come to grips with their failing health and abilities.
When Heads & Hearts Collide is a book that tells other caregivers of aging parents that they are not alone in their role reversal. Others have walked the path before them.
Excerpt
The phone's abrupt ring startled me awake. As my husband fumbled for the receiver, I recognized Dad's strained voice coming through the line. "I nee help," I heard him say, his breath gasping between the words.
We pulled on clothes and raced two blocks to my parent's home. Dad let us in and pointed to the bathroom floor where Mother lay unconscious, her eyes a glassy stare. While James worked with her, I dialed the ambulance. Dad paced between us repeating over and over, "She didn't fall; I caught her and 'easy-like' laid her on the floor." Stressing the "easy" part, he went through his actions as though he needed to prove that a fall did not cause her comatose state.
Professional Reviews
Glenda Stansbury, marketing and Development Director, In-Sight Books
A powerful story of one woman's struggle with the ever-growing issue of caring for elderly loved ones.
Marcia Schnedler, Universial Press Syndicate Columist
With disarming objectivity, Chandler relates how her faith, family, friends, and the medical profession helped--and occasionally hindered--her through difficult days with her demanding parents as their lives ebbed away.
All of us who take on the role of caregiver will see something of ourselves in this book--and gain comfort as well as insights when the guilt, anger, and frustration mingle with deep love and compassion. Chandler's words definnitely count.
Reverend John P. Miles, First United Methodist Church
Arline Chandler does a wonderful job of describing the difficult task of caring for an aging and dependent parent. She lovingly takes her readers into the world of suffering she and her family experienced. With our rapidly aging population, this book is very timely. It would be helpful reading for any adult who is going through the difficult process of caring for a dependent parent.
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