Before the Door Closes

Mind-altering drugs shackle her father to dementia. As if it were a holding pen for rotting trash, authorities in the nursing home system dispensed him to that dark cell. For the second time in their lives, Judy desperately searches for the answer to free her father. While growing up in an alcoholic environment, she struggled to find what drove him to drink. She was sure if she found it she could cure her father of alcoholism and make everyone happy. Judy finds the liberating key to his present imprisonment, but she cannot turn the lock until she revisits and reveals the shameful secret carefully and faithfully guarded for decades. While doing so, she confronts her fears and emotional wounds carved within a dysfunctional family. That is not enough, though, to rescue him, for the two are now ensnared by an unfamiliar adversary—nursing home neglect and abuse—that Judy must battle every day for her defenseless father. Through it all she longs for him to believe he is and always was important, worthy, loved. Are you a child of an alcoholic? a caregiver of the elderly? a seeker of love’s passages? This heart-gripping story shares pain and victory. "Before the Door Closes is very well written and revealing of the pains and triumphs of Judith Hall Simon’s journey with an alcoholic father. While reading this book I felt that I was reading the journey of only one person not two. Judith reveals just how overwhelming an alcoholic father can be and how one’s identity can be taken over by an alcoholic parent. Her book teaches and touches at the same time. I recommend it to the millions of adult children of alcoholics and to those who love them. Nice work!" ROBERT J. ACKERMAN, Ph.D., author of Perfect Daughters and a co-founder of the National Association for Children of Alcoholics