I discovered this book a few years ago when I was exploring caregiving coaching. My sister was caregiving for my mom; my sister-in-law was caregiving for my husband’s parents; it seemed like all my friends were caregiving for one or both of their parents; and, at cocktail parties and such, it was a dominant topic of conversation. And it still is.

I had been helpful to my sister, getting my mom’s home organized to support communications between my sister and the paid caregivers. If you’re going through this now, the most impactful thing I put in place – the thing that made an immediate, huge difference – was the simplest. I put a spiral notebook on the kitchen counter, where you’d see it when you first walked in, and got everyone leaving daily notes about what happened, how mom was doing, if something was broken, if the house had run out of something, calls from doctor’s offices, etc. Suddenly, everyone was on the same page. A lot of vendors out there are trying to monetize caregiving through technology and that’s fine – but start with the notebook: it relieved a lot of the pressure. The second thing I did was sit with my mom and make a list of her favorite foods so, when she had that moment of panic when the caregiver asked what she wanted for dinner, she could refer to the menu instead of saying, “Oh, whatever you want” and then not eating anything – but that might be specific to my mom’s needs.

If you’re not dealing with caregiving an adult (parent, spouse, aunt, elder sibling) right now, reading this book will give you compassion for people who do. If you are dealing with that, this book will make you realize that you are not alone (sometimes that is help enough).

Washington was caregiving for her husband, who was diagnosed with Cancer. She writes about trying to do it all, engaging with caregivers, realizing that brings challenges of its own, dealing with her siblings. Flipping through the book again while writing this post, I find that I underlined passages on every page. I’m not a passage-underliner, for the most part, but man, a lot of this resonated with me. One of the things that stands out to me is Washington’s recognition that she was trying to solve her husband’s cancer through her caregiving: to paraphrase, if she were just the perfect caregiver, everything would go back to normal. I see this a lot with people who are caregiving adults – and it’s just not true. Caregiving is important support for someone who needs care – but being the perfect caregiver is impossible and will not bring balance back into your life and restore the person you are caring for to health. Sometimes, as with cancer, the person you are caring for may go into remission and resume normal activities; but my in-laws have dementia and they’re not going to get better, no matter how perfect of a caregiver my sister-in-law is. Trying to be the perfect caregiver is not going to bring her parents back; it’s refusing to accept reality.

If you haven’t been through this yet, it’s coming for you. The best advice I got while researching this came from a caregiving coach who was working on a series of workshops for family members, designed to be given prior to the parent needing it. It led the adult children through a series of discussions about what to do when the parents got sick: who would do what (expecting your hedge-fund brother to help with hands-on caregiving may not be realistic but he could probably pick up the tab); how they would deal with doctors; where the parent(s) would live, etc. In these situations, it takes a village.

And they always sneak up on you unexpectedly: when my mother ended up in the emergency room and then an extended hospital stay, she had been gut-reno’ing her house and planning a trip to Machu-Picchu; we didn’t realize my mother-in-law’s cognitive decline until she fell and ended up in rehab. The doctor held out a handful of coins asked her to help him make change for a dollar, and she evaded that, the way she had been evading other cognitively-dependent requests for years, and that’s when we had to face it: she had been fooling us. We thought she was just stubborn.

These things sneak up on you. You need to be ready because there will never be enough time once it happens.

In my perfect world, insurers or workplaces would offer these workshops to get adult children ready. But that’s unlikely to happen in the US right now.

So it’s up to you.