I recently finished reading Sybil Lockhart's book, Mother in the Middle: A Biologist's Story of Caring for Parent and Child, a book I highly recommend. This memoir tells the story of one woman's balancing act as she mothers both her young children and her Alzheimer's stricken mother. It should be required reading for care-givers of all types. But here in the south, where it is common to find multiple generations in the same house, neighborhood, or town, I imagine this book will find a particularly receptive audience.

If you click on the link to the right in "categories" that says "Sandwich Generation," you will see that I was also a "mother in the middle" for three years, so when I speak about Sybil's book, I speak with the voice of experience. Of course, our situations were not the same, and no two caregiver situations can be the same. Regardless, I discovered echoes of my own experiences in the book that felt true and right and good, and I think many care-givers will find similar echoes of their own experiences.

Yet, this is not the only reason why I found the book remarkable.

The lyrical interweave of poetry and science, of the objective and the subjective, of the personal and the social stunned me. My grandmother had Alzheimer's, so I knew the symptoms, but I didn't know the causes, the way the brain changes as the disease progresses. I could have known, but the texts that described them were so dry, so lifeless that could never finish reading them. Mother in the Middle made the science real and living and fresh to me, and invited me see my grandmother's illness with new eyes. I understand what happened to her better now that I have read Mama in the Middle. For that I must thank Sybil -- what a great accomplishment!

The memoir is also simply a good story. Written with finesse and style, I read it in a few nights. The characters are believable in their struggles, the settings artfully described, and the plot carefully constructed. The book is a pure joy to read, beginning to end.