Giving Care

Giving Care is a real, unflinching, and deep story about a woman’s experience caring for her elderly mother with dementia. The piece uses serene, natural, visuals to discuss this complex relationship between mother and daughter.Praise for Giving CareIn Giving Care, Sue Mell delivers short, sharp and powerfully rendered essays on caregiving a parent in decline. Mell navigates the shifting mother-daughter boundaries along a complicated past, the relentless present with its crises and consequences, and on toward the inevitable future never far from view. Written with lyrical control, humor and truth at the core, Mell’s essays reveal a kind of grief that infiltrates further with each terrible task, while revealing each terrible task as a profound act of love.Stephanie Gangi, acclaimed novelist of The Next and Carry the DogGiving Care is a brief yet resonant collection that captures the quiet intimacy of caregiving in a series of vivid snapshots. Powerful, truthful, and never sentimental, it’s a tour through the world of a child turned adult and an adult returning to childhood.Kathryn Kulpa, author of Girls on FilmFor everyone worried about easing their mother’s decline, or about how their kids will handle their own decline, or what they’ll do without kids when the time comes, Sue Mell’s Giving Care is a box of bittersweet chocolates. One brief moment after another captured in urgent flashes, beautifully expressing what it’s like to keep going through moments dark and light in parental tending, hoping each day for our favorite flavor, that this one will be a good one.Allison K Willams, author of Seven Drafts