When the Time Comes: Families with Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and Solutions

What will you do when you get the call that a loved one has had a heart attack or a stroke? Or when you realize that a family member is too frail to live alone, but too healthy for a nursing home?

Journalist Paula Span shares the resonant narratives of several families who faced these questions. Each family contemplates the alternatives in elder care (from assisted living to multigenerational living to home care, nursing care, and at the end, hospice care) and chooses the right path for its needs. Span writes about the families' emotional challenges, their practical discoveries, and the good news that some of them find a situation that has worked for them and their loved ones. And many find joy in the duty of caring for an older loved one.

There are 45 million Americans caring for family members currently, and as the 77 million boomers continue to age, this number will only go up. Paula Span's stories are revealing and informative. They give a sense of all the emotional and practical factors that go into the major decisions about caregiving, so that readers will be better able to figure out what to do when the time comes for them and their loved ones.

Useful for anyone facing one of the most difficult periods in their lives: how to deal with an aging, ailing parent who needs help inside or outside the home.--Mary Ellen Geist, author of "Measure of the Heart."