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The co-op bookstore for avid readers
The Fifth Season: A Daughter-In-Law's Memoir of Caregiving
Finalist:Oregon Book Awards -Creative Nonfiction (2015)
Bronze Medal Winner:Independent Publisher Book Awards -Aging/Death & Dying (2014)
Lisa Ohlen Harris shared a household with her mother-in-law, Jeanne, for seven years. When Jeanne's health deteriorated due to COPD, Harris became one of 65 million American family caregivers. The two women grew so intertwined that Harris began to feel she herself was the one fading away. Harris helped Jeanne file an advance directive specifying that no extraordinary measures were to be taken to preserve life. As they navigated the healthcare system in Jeanne's final months, Harris and her mother-in-law realized that an advance directive is not as clear and controlled as it seems. End of life issues involve a series of small decisions--sneaky ones, with no big drama--and life support is already established before any one big decision is made. In The Fifth Season, Harris's recounting of those years bestows illuminating immediacy on the difficulties of caring for an elderly parent while raising four young children in an extended family household. Chronicling that last season of love and struggle as she grappled with ethical convictions and personality clashes, Harris finds her way through conflicted emotions to a place of compassion and peace.
Book Details
- Publisher: Texas Tech University Press
- Publish Date: Sep 15th, 2013
- Pages: 200
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 8.29in - 6.39in - 0.86in - 0.94lb
- EAN: 9780896728233
- Categories: • Terminal Care• Caregiving
About the Author
Harris, Lisa Ohlen: - Lisa Ohlen Harris lives in northwest Oregon with her husband and four daughters. She is the author of the Middle East memoir Through the Veil, a 2011 finalist for the Oregon Book Award. www.lisaohlenharris.com
More books by Lisa Ohlen Harris
Praise for this book
The Fifth Season is an eloquent weather warning, opening the door to public discussion. With honesty and compassion, Lisa Ohlen Harris draws on personal experience to delineate the difficult end-of-life questions we all must face.
--Judith Kitchen, author of Half in Shade
--Judith Kitchen, author of Half in Shade
In The Fifth Season, Lisa Ohlen Harris shows us how caregiving is an act that requires both self-awareness and selflessness. In prose that does not flinch from the hard realities of caring for her ailing mother-in-law, Harris also evokes the tenderness at the heart of this intimate act. She comes to understand that, as she puts it, "this, too, is a holy union."
--Brenda Miller, author of Listening Against the Stone
--Brenda Miller, author of Listening Against the Stone
Lisa Ohlen Harris's The Fifth Season, an unflinching chronicle of caring for her ill mother-in-law, is also a love story between unlikely partners, "strangers in blood," whose chosen bond, though tested again and again, never breaks.
--Rebecca McClanahan, author of The Tribal Knot and The Riddle Song and Other Rememberings