100 books like Making Loss Matter

I founded the All-Weather Friend, which is about helping friends get through difficult situations. My first book, Alzheimer’s: A Crash Course for Friends and Relatives, tells how to help people living with dementia. I’ve had hard times in my life—my husband’s brain tumor and suicide, my father’s dementia, infertility, miscarriage, my brother’s sudden death, and other things that flooded me with grief. But my life is filled with joy; I’ve learned that joy comes from God and from a compassionate connection with friends and people we love. I write and speak about “informed compassion.” I hope you’ll visit my website, where there’s a great dementia resource page with contributions by many readers.

I founded the All-Weather Friend, which is about helping friends get through difficult situations. My first book, Alzheimer’s: A Crash Course for Friends and Relatives, tells how to help people living with dementia. I’ve had hard times in my life—my husband’s brain tumor and suicide, my father’s dementia, infertility, miscarriage, my brother’s sudden death, and other things that flooded me with grief. But my life is filled with joy; I’ve learned that joy comes from God and from a compassionate connection with friends and people we love. I write and speak about “informed compassion.” I hope you’ll visit my website, where there’s a great dementia resource page with contributions by many readers.

I founded the All-Weather Friend, which is about helping friends get through difficult situations. My first book, Alzheimer’s: A Crash Course for Friends and Relatives, tells how to help people living with dementia. I’ve had hard times in my life—my husband’s brain tumor and suicide, my father’s dementia, infertility, miscarriage, my brother’s sudden death, and other things that flooded me with grief. But my life is filled with joy; I’ve learned that joy comes from God and from a compassionate connection with friends and people we love. I write and speak about “informed compassion.” I hope you’ll visit my website, where there’s a great dementia resource page with contributions by many readers.

I founded the All-Weather Friend, which is about helping friends get through difficult situations. My first book, Alzheimer’s: A Crash Course for Friends and Relatives, tells how to help people living with dementia. I’ve had hard times in my life—my husband’s brain tumor and suicide, my father’s dementia, infertility, miscarriage, my brother’s sudden death, and other things that flooded me with grief. But my life is filled with joy; I’ve learned that joy comes from God and from a compassionate connection with friends and people we love. I write and speak about “informed compassion.” I hope you’ll visit my website, where there’s a great dementia resource page with contributions by many readers.

I have been teaching college students about aging since I was in my late 20s. The audacity! Now that I am officially in the “young-old” category I used to describe to my students, I more fully appreciate the social constructions of aging that affect elders, the medical conditions that can derail plans for “a good old age,” and the challenges we all face in attempting to live with meaning and purpose as we grow older. In addition to teaching, writing about, and researching various aspects of aging, especially aging with various type of dementia, my work has addressed the positive and negative ways religious faith can shape how people cope with aging.

An author of a caregiving memoir myself, I’m also a former magazine and newspaper editor who has had the opportunity to read and write about many topics. For the past five years, I have been a manager and director of AlzAuthors, an online global organization that offers the world’s most comprehensive collection of books and blogs on Alzheimer’s and dementia. To say I have done a lot of reading on this subject is an understatement. I’ve been honored to work with so many talented and big-hearted authors who share their Alzheimer’s and dementia experiences. Being immersed in the Alzheimer’s world through AlzAuthors has given me insight into many of the best memoirs on this subject.   

As an old age psychiatrist, I was naturally interested in dementia. But I’m also trained to doctoral level in philosophy. I’ve been both an honorary professor of philosophy of ageing (at Newcastle) and a professor of old age psychiatry (at Bristol). Whilst training in psychiatry at Oxford, I came across the work of Tom Kitwood. Subsequently, I’ve become great friends with Steve Sabat. His work and Kitwood’s brought home to me the complexity of personhood and its relevance to how we care for and think about people living with dementia. And the more you consider it, the more the notion of personhood broadens out to include citizenship and human rights.

I am a novelist, a journalist, a humanist celebrant, and coauthor with my husband of the best-selling Nicci French thrillers. Witnessing my father’s dementia and his slow-motion dying radically transformed the way I think about what it is to be human. In 2014, I founded John’s Campaign which seeks to make the care of those who are vulnerable and powerless more compassionate, and which is now a national movement in the UK. In 2016, I won the Orwell Prize for Journalism for ‘exposing Britain’s social evils' in the pieces I wrote exploring the nature of dementia.

As an educator, author of children’s books, and caregiver of a loved one with dementia, I felt that I had to write a story about the disease from a child’s point of view. When I became a caregiver, I was struck by the lack of information for children and the misconceptions of the public about the disease. I wanted to create a story that reassures children and gives them guidance on how they can help be a caregiver. I added the Author’s Note to provide accurate information to adults so that more people are aware of the signs of dementia and to build understanding and compassion. 

Children’s stories about memory loss, Alzheimer’s, and dementia resonate with me because I know firsthand how difficult it is to care for someone with this disease. My Aunt Luella had Alzheimer’s, and I cared for her in my home. When my aunt no longer remembered me, my heart ached. I felt hopeless, afraid. I can only imagine how difficult it is for a child to watch as a beloved grandparent forgets them. I found these five books to be helpful and inspiring. They offer hope. They embrace the love that still exists.