Floating in the Deep End: How Caregivers Can See Beyond Alzheimer's Patti Davis(2021)

With the heartfelt prose of a loving daughter, Patti Davis provides a life raft for the caregivers of Alzheimer’s patients. “ For the decade of my father’s illness, I felt as if I was floating in the deep end, tossed by waves, carried by currents, but not drowning ,” writes Patti Davis in this searingly honest and deeply moving account of the challenges involved in taking care of someone stricken with Alzheimer’s. When her father, the fortieth president of the United States, announced his Alzheimer’s diagnosis in an address to the American public in 1994, the world had not yet begun speaking about this cruel, mysterious disease. Yet overnight, Ronald Reagan and his immediate family became the face of Alzheimer’s, and Davis, once content to keep her family at arm’s length, quickly moved across the country to be present during “the journey that would take [him] into the sunset of [his] life.” Empowered by all she learned from caring for her father―about the nature of the illness, but als