Gifts From the Heart : Meditations on Caring for Aging Parents

If you are caring for aged parents, you should run right out and buy this wonderful little book. It deals with that time when our situation with parents is reversed, when the child becomes the caregiver, the supervisor, the shepherd charged with guiding those who brought us in the front door of this life out its back door. This can be a momentous time, when responsibility can hang almost too heavy. But it can also be a time of joy and healing. Goldberg and Kendall have put together a collection of meditations on old age and caregiving that show how to turn the frustrations, exhaustions, and traumas of caring for old parents into a time of spiritual enrichment. Like Goldberg's Room to Write and The Spirit of Pregnancy, Gifts from the Heart is a book to keep beside the bed, a book to be dipped into and savored. It will restore your spirit when you are exhausted by duties and demands, and encourage you to look beyond the day-to-day to the beauties and revelations that can heal divisions between child and parent and bring about a final separation that rises toward transcendence. This is not a how-to book, although it abounds with practical suggestions. Rather, it is a series of parables, simple on the surface, but full of depths and comfort. It is a book to heal the human spirit.

This book was a lot more than help for people with sick parents or people who's parents live with them. It shows how to enrich one's relationship to one's parents in their elder years,and how to gain insight into one's own life and aging process through frequent or occassional interaction with one's parents.