Description
Book SynopsisDrawing on medicine, social science, philosophy, and religion to provide a broad perspective on aging, Aging Together offers a vision of relationships filled with love, joy, and hope in the face of a condition that all too often elicits anxiety, hopelessness, and despair.
Trade ReviewA serious, scholarly, and sensitive book. -- Mary Gergen PsycCRITIQUES This must-read volume will inspire the reader to contemplate the call to care for others with self-giving love. Highly recommended. Choice This is not a how-to handbook but a kindly and perhaps over-optimistic general discussion that will be of interest to caregivers, particularly Americans, and particularly those coming from a religious background. The rest of us can all gain something from it too, however... Aging Together reminds us that warmth and friendship can be maintained in trying situations. -- Martin Guha International Psychogeriatrics Readable and useful...Anyone who wants to teach, practise or encourage person-centred care for people with dementia will find a lot in this book. -- Ibadete Fetahu Nursing Times This is not just a book about ageing, dementia, and friendship; it is a book that will take the reader on a journey that will, hopefully, leave them in a better place than where they started... An excellent account of travelling along the dementia road. -- Kathryn Mitchell Ageing and Society A compelling call to arms for a more caring, related society-a flourishing community-from which all can benefit, and in which all have a part to play. -- Justine McGovern LMSW Journal of Gerontological Social Work Aging Together offers a prophetic perspective by challenging our socially constructed versions of reality and our tendency to look for medical miracles and cures. Instead we should work to create communities that are hospitable to the cognitively impaired. -- Anthony B. Robinson Christian Century
Table of ContentsPreface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Dilemmas of Dementia Diagnoses
2. Receiving the Diagnosis
3. Personhood
4. What Is Friendship?
5. When Our Friends Travel the Dementia Road
6. Dementia Fear and Anxiety
7. Beyond Fear and Anxiety
8. The Flourishing Community
9. Congregations as Schools for Friendship
10. The Things That Abide
11. Practicing Friendship in the "Thin Places"
12. Memory, Forgetting, and the Present Time
Discussion Questions
Notes
References
Index
