Book Description

This important book helps families address the necessary legal hurdles and emotional difficulties that arise with aging parents. Addressing the areas of relationships, emotions, and dignity with practical and scriptural insights, this book will help to ensure that the aging parent is protected along with the other relationships in the family. Love’s Way is a book that adult families will want to keep handy and return to often. Written by two family mediators, it provides readers with a map through the weeds that spring up along the path as parents age and roles reverse. Using real-life examples from years of working with families in this season of life, the authors illustrate common issues that can send a family into serious issues: unhealed sibling rivalries, parental favoritism, greed, secrecy, and fear of initiating necessary conversations. Readers will learn how to spot potential problems before they become crises and prevent or rectify them in their own families. They’ll learn what documents everyone needs, how to work with forgiveness, how to speak truth in love, and how to let go. Most importantly, readers (both adult children and their parents) will gain tools to create their own win-win solutions that keep parents safe and autonomous and family love intact. Although Carolyn Miller Parr and Sig Cohen come from different faith traditions (Carolyn is Christian and Sig is Jewish), both are deeply committed. As a result, Love’s Way is both spiritual and practical. It overflows with advice readers can immediately begin to apply, with stories from the authors’ fifteen years as co-mediators, writers, speakers, and personal experiences as caregivers to their own aging parents. Carolyn Miller Parr is a retired judge, mediator, writer, and public speaker. She graduated from Stetson University (BA), Vanderbilt (MA English), and Georgetown Law (JD). Since 2002, Judge Parr has practiced peacemaking through her mediation practice Beyond Dispute and Tough Conversations with Sig Cohen. Sig Cohen is a retired Foreign Service officer, fundraiser, and community organizer, and now serves as a mediator. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania (BS) and the University of Chicago (MA in International Relations).