Precious Days & Practical Love

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List Price: $19.95

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Caring For Your Aging Parent

James Taylor

224 PP | 6" x 9"
Paper
ISBN: 978-1-896836-34-8

When one of our parents needs care, the relationship that we have known all of our lives turns upside-down. Suddenly, we are responsible for the woman who read us bedtime stories, or for the man who walked us to school.

Caring for an aging parent involves more than finding a care facility or dealing with legal and financial matters. It means feeling the frustration of always being "on call" if you live close by, or feeling helpless and guilty because you live far away and can do relatively little. It means riding the emotional roller coaster of having your roles reversed. It's about the pain of being unable to change the inevitable, but of having an inner compulsion to do what you can to make those final weeks or years as gentle as possible. It's about continuing to love, in spite of everything, until the very end...and beyond.

Precious Days & Practical Love will help children of aging parents make the final months or years among the best experiences they'll have to remember. and it will help counsellors understand the joys and challenges families may face.

James Taylor, Author

Jim Taylor is one of Canada's best known authors and editors among mainline churches and denominations. He is the author of sixteen books himself including The Spirituality of Pets (2006), An Everyday God (2005), Precious Days and Practical Love: Caring for an Aging Parent (1999), The Canadian Religious Travelguide (1982), Discovering Discipleship (with George Johnston, 1983), Two Worlds in One (1985), Last Chance (1989), Surviving Death (1993) republished as Letters to Stephen (1996), Everyday Psalms (1994), Everyday Parables (1995), Sin: A New Understanding of Virtue and Vice (1997), Lifelong Living (for the United Church's Division of Mission in Canada) (1983), and The Spiritual Crisis of Cancer (for the Canadian Cancer Society) (1984).

He was the founding editor of the ecumenical clergy journal Practice of Ministry in Canada (PMC) for the first 15 years of its publication. He was for 13 years Managing Editor of The United Church Observer. A co-founder of Wood Lake Books, Taylor lives and works in British Columbia's Okanagan Valley.

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Media Reviews

Peter Griffiths, Rural Roots

I have never read a book, which combined such an insightful sharing of facts and feelings as is found in Taylor's book. I recommend this book to anyone who has aging parents, whether or not, or, anyone who works with the elderly. They will find this book an eye-opener, and a source of support for them, when the time comes that they have struggle their way down that road that is new, strange, unlit and often scary.

Don Wonnacott, Spirit Catalyst

I have a strong preference for this book, both for the thoughtful and sensitive awareness of the emotional elements, and for the very practical elements, not the least the appendices that provide other resources for the person who is starting down this difficult road of caring for those who gave us life and nurtured us.

For those of us who are approaching those years of serious decline, the best gift we could give ourselves is to give a copy of this book to our adult children who one day may face those very issues in caring for us.

Glad Tidings

In a very down-to-earth style, the author prepares us and works through the realities of the financial and legal aspects of the different stages of this emotional time. By being better informed we can make better decisions and choices which can make the final months or years of our parents among the best experiences we have to remember.