After getting collateral PTSD, a condition common among caregivers, Virginia Eubanks found help in an old lifesaving manual. Then she signed up for instruction in matters such as wilderness first aid and interviewed experts from neuroscientists to forest rangers about how she could better prepare herself for the long-term challenges she’d face. In A Guide to Open Water Lifesaving – Lessons on Love, Care, and Survival: A Memoir, she writes about the lessons learned, none perhaps more important than that to rescue her partner, she would also have to rescue herself. Laura Mauldin’s In Sickness and in Health: Love Stories from the Front Lines of America’s Caregiving Crisis is a moving account of the country’s failure to provide meaningful support to its chronically ill and disabled citizens, and our resulting reliance on unpaid caregivers. Speaking from her experience as someone who became a full-time caregiver to her partner, she urges a radical reimagining of care as a collective responsibility. When Rebecca McClanahan‘s elderly, frail parents could no longer care for themselves, she and her husband became their “first responders.” In Light Falls on Everything: A Daughter’s Memoir of Caregiving, Grief, and Possibility, she shares the exhaustion, heartbreak, and grief that can shadow the most ordinary days when you become a parent’s caregiver. Yet light flickers in the darkest corners and reveals moments of tenderness, laughter, surprise, and love.

Buy A Guide to Open Water Lifesaving – Lessons on Love, Care, and Survival: A Memoir

Buy In Sickness and in Health: Love Stories from the Front Lines of America’s Caregiving Crisis

Buy Light Falls on Everything: A Daughter’s Memoir of Caregiving, Grief, and Possibility