Recommended Reading: A Bittersweet Season

We know that as a caregiver, “summer reading” can seem like a faraway fantasy. When you’re taking care of a loved one, you aren’t spending summer days stretched out on a beach blanket with a hefty novel in one hand and a garnished drink in the other. 

But making a little room for reading, whether before bed, when you’re riding public transit or when waiting at the doctor’s office, can be a welcome escape from your day-to-day worries and provide insights into caregiving and the issues that go along with it. In our book reviews, we’ll explore books that include practical help for caregiving while being enjoyable to read, too. And there’s no better book to kick off this reading list than A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents—and Ourselves by Jane Gross.

Gross uses her own experience caring for her elderly mother as the backdrop and fills the foreground with step-by-step instructions to make the experience for the reader as crisis-free as possible. As we follow her story, Gross offers up plenty of tips to the reader, like:

• Specialists can only care for the health of one part of the body, not the whole health of your loved one, so it’s important to always have a general practitioner—or even better, a geriatrician (p.146)

• When looking at any facility, whether it be a hospital or nursing home: “it should smell neither of urine nor heavy disinfectant” (p.132) and watch how well they care for patients’ dentures (p.129)

• When exactly you should start talking with loved ones about their wishes regarding end of life care, death, and memorial services: “if you are 40 and your parents are 70...it’s time to start talking”. (p.277)

• The inability to rise from a chair without pushing off with both hands “is one of the primary predictors that an elderly person is approaching the point of dependency on others. It is a far more accurate barometer of how they are likely to progress in the coming years than any standard medical test.” (p.145)

Gross uses the expertise she culled from interviews with fellow caregivers, their loved ones, doctors, nurses, geriatricians, social workers, geriatric care managers, as well as extensive research from countless books, studies, articles and observations from her own experience. The result is a book that becomes an absolute must-read. When you’re done you’ll have a firm grasp on the most important questions to ask doctors, hospital discharge managers and personal aides. You will know the difference between “real” incontinence and “functional” incontinence, and how understanding that difference could keep your loved one from having a dangerous fall. In short, you will get a crash-course in caregiving that reads like a memoir. Gross never insults the reader’s intelligence, never sugar-coats what it is to be a caregiver. In A Bittersweet Season, she is that good friend we all need—the one who’s been there, who knows exactly when to offer up a handful of tips and when to give the reader a good laugh.

A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents—and Ourselves
by Jane Gross
368 pp. Knopf, 2011