Book Description

"The Caregiving Years, Six Stages to a Meaningful Journey" helps you answer these questions: Why me? Why now? What now? While other books focus on your family member or friend who needs your help and care, this book focuses just on you and what you need to manage the experience of caregiving. The handbook, now in its eighth edition, helps you feel better about your todays while understanding what you'll need for your tomorrows. You'll read what caregiving is really like but you'll also see that you will make it through. The last stage, The Godspeed Caregiver, nudges you to live your dream, a dream newly defined by your caregiving experience. "The Caregiving Years" is separated into six stages, beginning when you expect to care for a family member and ending about two years after caregiving ends. Because caregiving can be such a complicated experience, the handbook provides simple coping strategies, wrapped in a keyword and a purpose, to help in each stages. You carry each coping strategy into the next stage so you are armed with empowering tools. Each stage also includes action plans to guide you. The handbook tells the story of a family caregiver throughout the stages, as well as offers tips to help you navigate the bad days, the difficult decisions and the overwhelming emotions. You'll find articles which offer suggestions to give you courage when you venture out of the house after staying inside for too long, exercises to help you understand your limits and build your team, and quizzes to make you laugh, reset your perspective and remind you that you have solutions. The handbook will prompt you to be proactive so you'll be as ready as you can for what's next, and will show you how to create memories which will comfort you later.