What happens when the person you love unravels from a chronic, incurable disease?
With raw honesty and piercing insight, Slow Loss chronicles a woman's emotional journey as her husband succumbs to Parkinson's and dementia, and she evolves from wife to caregiver to widow.
Heartbreaking and laced with dark humor, Kelly's poignant memoir unveils the realities of caregiving, from being crushed by anger and fear to making hard decisions with surprising outcomes. It is brave, fresh, inspirational, and encouraging without a whiff of toxic positivity or sappiness.
Slow Loss speaks to anyone facing the gradual loss of a loved one, offering hard-earned wisdom, a beacon of hope, and so much love.
Let Lois Kelly's unflinching account be your lifeline.
“Brave and inspiring, from a compassionate truth-teller.”
Fast-paced and devastatingly honest, yet full of wit and verve
Fast-paced and devastatingly honest, yet full of wit and verve, “Slow Loss” offers a portrait of a caregiver and a marriage in crisis throughout a brutal ordeal with Parkinson's disease. Caregivers of all types will appreciate and identify with Lois Kelly's often raw, ultimately hopeful inside look at what it means to care for those we love most.
Kate Washington, author of “Already Toast: Caregiving and Burnout in America”
Instructive, entertaining, and profoundly thought-provoking…
With the naked honesty and dark humor usually reserved for those in caregiver support groups, Lois Kelly tells us the story of her marriage. It's her story, but it's mine too, and yours, if you are caring for a spouse with chronic illness or if you love someone who is, and you want to help.
I thought I knew how to help when I practiced medicine, caring for frail elders at the end of their lives, making home visits, and sitting with their caregivers. After living with my husband's Parkinson's for twenty-five years, I know better now.
If you believe we write to find the meaning in our lives so that our spirits will grow and connect as they are meant to do, you will find this story instructive, entertaining, and profoundly thought-provoking. Read it and pass it on.
Patricia Gifford, MD
A fierce, cleansing fire of honesty and respect
For anyone facing the years of caring for someone with a debilitating, life-altering illness who is not interested in bumper sticker-insta-happy-crappy nonsense but rather the fierce, cleansing fire of honesty, read this book.
Lois Kelly uncovers the harshness of loving a man diagnosed with Parkinson's. In her devotion to telling the truth, she enables us to choose how we might get through and what good we might yet discover within ourselves and in the outer world.
There is light here, for sure, and a speckled hope, but even more so, there is respect: for the love she and her husband shared, for the relentless press of the disease, and for our own capacity as readers to tolerate the truth, and from that piercing honesty, be changed.
Maria Sirois, Psy.D., author, “A Short Course in Happiness After Loss (and Other, Dark Difficult Times)”
An achingly real and emotional journey…
Lois Kelly takes us on an achingly real and emotional journey. So many caregiving books unintentionally make caregivers feel guilty about what they should be doing for themselves or their care recipients. Not "Slow Loss."
This memoir of how Lois coped, sometimes with compassion and curiosity, other times grasping for control and certainty, reminds caregivers that relationships are not easy, life is messy and unpredictable, and it is all OK.
Joan K. Monin, PhD, Associate Professor, Yale School of Public Health
“As a wife who is also now a fulltime caregiver for my husband who is 12 years into Parkinson’s, I devoured Slow Loss on Kindle last night and have ordered the book in paperback. It’s been a long time since I felt so connected, engaged and somehow, for a short time, free. Thank you is wholly inadequate.”
“My dear wife is now suffering from Parkinson’s dementia, and it is accelerating. Reading “Slow Loss” hit me hard. Yet, seeing that I am not alone in my doubts, lack of constant patience, and overarching sadness is a tonic that I wish I had found sooner. Thank you, Lois Kelly, for your words..”