Old Parents and Purple Tulips: Navigating The Maze Of Care-giving, Dementia, Sibling Conflict, And Guns

Old Parents and Purple Tulips is not a pretty story, but it’s a valuable story – a thought-provoking story – a necessary story for American families in the throes of dealing with a burgeoning aging population and for the 3 million people annually diagnosed with Alzheimer’s within those families. Old Parents and Purple Tulips is a fictionalized narrative memoir based on the experiences of one family, their successes and failures in recognizing and dealing with mental deterioration of loved ones, and the impact on family relationships of those who become care-givers. The two-volume story tells of a ten-year traverse through a painful, frustrating, often bizarre, and occasionally humorous pathway as the main care-giver, the daughter in the family, becomes the parent of her parents. This ordeal necessitated her seeking a guardianship for both parents through county superior court, and excluding an older brother based on his financial mismanagement of the parents’ affairs and sometimes even physical abuse.