Book Excerpt
Excerpted from “Tears on My Pillow”
I spent that first week at the
hospital, returning each evening to our Whidbey Island home to recharge. I
needed to gaze at the water and mountains visible from the house and yard. I
needed to re-energize myself in the quiet of our neighborhood and cuddle with
our cat Lydia. My first night alone, however, was not a peaceful experience.
The house felt abandoned, empty of a part of its life energy. I was
qualitatively different from the person who left the house earlier that day. I
don’t remember how I got home that first night. I must have been on automatic
pilot, pointing the car in what I thought was the right direction and hoping
that it, like a well-trained horse, would find its way back to the ferry
terminal and then to its garage. When I left her hospital room, Deloris was
asleep, looking nothing like the vibrant and beautiful woman with whom I had
shared two decades of life. Granted no one looks their best in a hospital gown with
wires and IV tubes extending from their body. Yet as I watched her lie there,
slack-jawed, pale, expressionless, in a drug- and stroke-induced
unconsciousness, the enormity and uncertainty of the situation swamped my mind.
Not knowing was awful. I could not help but grieve and imagine the worst
possible futures.
Once home, after feeding the cat and
eating some dinner, I sat on the deck with a glass of wine. I hoped the silent
beauty of the star-filled late summer night might calm me. It didn't.
Later, alone and lonely in bed, I
cried myself to sleep, the first of many such nights.
About The Book
Title: Learning to Float
Author: Allan Ament
Genre: Memoir
Allan and Deloris Ament’s lives take a
dramatic turn when Deloris suffers a debilitating stroke. No longer an
equal partner in marriage, Allan becomes Deloris’s primary caregiver,
responsible for maintaining their household and her well-being. Learning to Float
describes Allan’s transformation from a criminal defense attorney to a
compassionate, emotionally vulnerable caregiver. Drawing on
contemporaneously written emails and private journal entries, Ament
unflinchingly exposes his emotional, mental, and physical ups and downs,
consistently focusing on the love, humor, and opportunities for
personal and spiritual growth he experiences on this journey. Anyone
with the possibility of becoming a caregiver for a loved one, now or in
the future, will benefit from the insights Ament shares. Everyone will
be buoyed by the love Allan and Deloris experience as they face their
new normal.
Author Bio
After
successful careers as a criminal defense attorney, higher education
administrator and instructor, and day spa manager, Allan Ament now
enjoys retirement with his wife, an award-winning journalist and author,
and their semi-neurotic cat (are there other kinds?) They live on an
island in Puget Sound, north of Seattle, where, in addition to writing
and being his wife’s primary caregiver, Ament serves as board chair for
the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts (nila.edu). His work has
previously appeared in academic, professional, and literary journals,
and is included in an upcoming anthology, Being: What Makes a Man. Learning to Float is his first book-length work.
Links
Blog: allanament.com
Twitter: @allanament
Purchase Links:
Giveaway
Win a signed paperback copy of the book along with a Whidbey Island, WA goodie basket with bonus Seattle coffee and mug.Go here to participate in the giveaway.
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