We invite you to of links and articles related to disability and aging. We also invite you to and photos on this theme.

Bionic, with a Sense of Humor. Christine Purves has led an active life, one full of people, church, music, and sports. At age ninety-three, you can find her attending church and Bluffton University athletic and music events with the help of friends. This article by Kathy Dickson appeared in our February 2013 issue of Connections.

ADNet's July 2012 issue of Connections Newsletter featured stories, articles, reviews, and resources on dementia and caregiving.

• Savoring the Present. Mike and Mary Lehman Yoder of Goshen, Indiana, reflect on their journey with early-onset Alzheimer's disease.
• “What am I doing? Where am I going?”  Cheryl Paulovich, chaplain at a skilled nursing facility in Glendale, Arizona, talks about meaningful ways to offer spiritual care for persons with dementia.
• Hospitality: Caregivers and Persons with Dementia. Carolyn Stoll, Parish Nurse at Bahia Vista Mennonite Church, Sarasota, Florida, suggests ways to offer support.
• Recommended Resources on Dementia and Caregiving. A children' book, books for adults, and links to online resources from Anabaptist writers and others.

Will You Hold Me as I Held You? Article by Michael A. King in The Mennonite, February 3, 2009 issue. ...Our commitment to span each other's needs and stages across life's journey from cradle to grave...is one way we begin to teach each other that the love of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting. Read more...

Embracing Aging: Families Facing Change

Video by Mennonite Media Productions. DVD is available from ADNet for loan or purchase. 58 minutes plus bonus content. Change and getting older is inevitable. So how can we make it the best it can be? Families, experts and "wise ones" share insights on aging, housing choices, facing illness, and cooperating as siblings in the care of aging parents. Residents of a cohousing community for those over 55 offer attractive alternatives for the aging years.

Embracing Aging website offers diverse resources to support aging adults and their families.

Care.com is a secular resource that offers many articles and resources pertaining to the needs of older adults and their caregivers.

Connections Newsletter April 2013

Relentless Goodbye: Grief and Love in the Shadow of Dementia

By Ginny Horst Burkholder. Herald Press, 2012.

Reviewed by Christine Guth, ADNet Program Director

In Relentless Goodbye: Grief and Love in the Shadow of Dementia, Ginny Horst Burkholder tells a highly personal story of coming to terms, over many years, with her husband's dementia. Lewy body dementia gradually transforms him from beloved life partner to recipient of care, still much loved.
 
Readers who deal with cumulative losses, especially those due to disability of some kind, will find much to identify with in the author's gripping, searingly honest recounting of crushed expectations and day-by-day, dogged faithfulness to difficult commitments. As her husband's health spirals downward, Burkholder shares with readers the fruit of her determined effort to give her fears a voice, and the gradual empowerment this process gives her to claim her own value.
 
Relentless Goodbye is an expression of the author's faith, a faith planted firmly in this world of loss and grief, but connected to an enduring and renewing Presence. The tension between the two is reflected when she writes, "I seem to hold God's goodness in one hand and feelings of betrayal and abandonment in another" (99).

Faith and love are threads running throughout the book, surviving a relentless series of losses and sustaining the author through increasingly difficult circumstances. "I'm beginning to see that faith is not lack of questions, and love does not come without pain," she writes at the book's conclusion (263). Offering hope for all who confront life's hard limitations, she concludes, "I want to go forward knowing love and Presence even in the pain and loss. I hold on to hope that I will" (264).

You may purchase Relentless Goodbye from online booksellers, including MennoMedia.

Back to newsletter

Many files on ADNet Online require the use of the Adobe Reader. This is available free of charge for all operating systems from Adobe. Click on the icon below to download the latest version.