Bøger af Nancy Taylor Robson

What matters most when someone close to you has been diagnosed as terminal? Time and quality of life for both of you. Coping with both the practical and emotional questions of this challenging passage. We area ll going to die one day, yet every death is individual -- as is the walk toward that individual death both for the one leaving and for the ones they leave behind. Focusing on what truly matters between human beings while taking care of the business of living at the end of life is what this book is about.This book offers: -Practical tips for coping with the physical changes that will impact both the person and the caregiver emotionally, physically, financially and spiritually. -Advice on what to put in place before the person dies to make things a little easier for those they leave behind. -The stories and examples of others to let people know they are not alone-Advice and tips for those who are not going to be primary caregiver, but whole are friends, neighbors, colleagues or any other part of the relationships we all share in lifeThere is no perfect way to walk through this time in life. (There's no perfect way to walk through all of life for that matter). But there are good ways to do it. Focusing on what matters while taking care of the practical business of living and dying can make this walk slightly less scary and more rewarding for everyone. How to use this book: Browse the chapter headings; skip around in the TIPS for ways to approach or solve specific problems. Search the Sources lists at the end of the chapters for additional information on a question or need. Read the stories of others' experiences. For the co-worker, the friend and the neighbor, this book offers advice and helpful hints on what to say or do as well as what not to say or do. For the loved one, spouse, and relative it's a practical guide to what you might expect at each stage and offers realistic and reasonable coping strategies. It includes examples born of the experience of a range of people -- professionals in the field as well as no-professionals like yourself -- of what you might experience on this difficult journey.Yet, as we've said, each death is individual just as are the relationships, personalities and personal dynamics involved in each death. Despite the individuality of experience, there are also issues and threads that are universal in human life. This book can act as a practical guide, an encouraging friend, and support, and offers hope for the best possible experience as you help to walk someone home. Across America, 43.5 million people, (nearly one in five adults) care for a loved one 50 or older according to AARP.The Writers: Sue Collins has been a nurse for 38 years and a hospice nurse for 28 years. She has the extensive experience of the professional caregiver and has seen virtually everything at the end of life. As much as anything this book arises out of the OMG!I-can't-believe-they-said-that/did-that moments as well as the anger, frustration, grace and poignancy she has witnessed during the last days of patients for whom she has cared.Nancy Taylor Robson, author of three other books, lost her father to bone cancer, which took approximately three years from diagnosis to departure, and her mother-in-law to a long decline and a series of strokes. She has sat by deathbeds and seen more than one friend through the last months, weeks, days and hours of life and knows that as painful a journey as this is, there can be gifts and blessings along the way. She knows, (at least intellectually), that none of us is getting out of here alive.

Nancy Taylor Robson is one of the first women in the country to earn a US Coast Guard license. She grew up sailing and building boats with her father and worked as a housepainter, desk clerk and yacht maintenance person while in college. After earning a degree in history, she married and went to work alongside her husband as cook/deckhand on an old 85-foot tugboat. The fear of being maimed or lost overboard, the male opposition, and the drudgery during seagoing tours that ranged from Maine to Florida, Bermuda, New Orleans and Mexico was coupled with romantic sunsets, a ringside seat on nature and an appreciation for hard won accomplishment. Robson, one of a handful of women who paved the way for every intrepid woman who has followed, brings that world alive. Author of numerous articles and essays, Nancy Taylor Robson is also the author of two novels: Course of the Waterman and A Love Like No Other: Abigail and John Adams, A Modern Love Story.

Passion, heartbreak, scandal and triumph. Abigail and John Adams endured it all. It was a marriage of unequal equals. The timeless and universal battle between men and women for control, comfort, respect, a voice. "Remember the ladies!" Abigail wrote to John at the Continental Congress in March 1776. A cry to give women the vote, a legal say - finally! - in their own lives in the new country they were creating. He ignored her. She was furious. Still, she persisted, and adored him. Her soulmate. And by sheer force of personality, she forged, as much as can be created between two human beings, a true partnership. In a time when childbirth was taking your life in your hands, she hungered for him. And he wanted her. "My wife! My Wife!" She bore him six children and buried four. Death - smallpox, yellow fever, alcoholism, cancer - was an ever-present shadow, politics as backbiting, frustrating and divisive as today, friendships frayed yet loyalties sometimes held, and love endured. Despite unendurable separations, inflation, war, shipwreck, and loss, they stood against all comers. Together. They lived 200 years ago but their love affair was as modern as any today. They married in 1764 against both of their mothers' wishes. Passionate, independent, and determined, Abigail worked to raise, educate, and launch their children while John labored to midwife a new nation. A Love Like No Other is a timeless story of struggle, ambition, heartbreak and triumph, but most of all it's the story of an enduring love against all odds.

Seventeen-year-old Bailey Kraft, descended from a long line of Chesapeake waterman -- river royalty -- knows where he is going. He will "e;follow the water like his father, grandfather, and generations of men before him. The work is backbreaking and often dangerous yet framed by the breathtaking beauty of the Chesapeake; it is a bred-in-the-bone life. But it is also a dying livelihood. Fish stocks are plummeting and with them, the harvests. Watermen, unable to earn a living, are being forced to give up their time-honored way of life. Yet Bailey is a Kraft---river royalty---with the Kraft gift for finding fish coded into his genes. He has a sense of purpose and belonging, until the day his father shatters his lifelong plans. Suddenly, he must fight the people he loves most, including his best friend, to hang on to his birthright. Set on the Chesapeake Bay's Eastern Shore, Course of the Waterman is the coming-of-age story of Bailey Kraft; his tough and determined little sister, Hannah; his best friend, Booty; and Booty's bitter, alcoholic father, Tud. Bailey faces fear, loss, and wrenching changes; yet amidst it all, he glimpses the unexpected possibilities that life can offer.Like the Kraft men before him, Bailey has river water in his veins, and a peculiar talent for finding fish: the Krafts are river royalty. But every year the haul is less impressive, and supporting a family by fishing is becoming increasingly difficult. Early in the book Bailey's father Orrin announces that he wants his son to go to college, to have options that he didn't have. This change in plan is wholly unwelcome: Bailey had expected to fish full-time after finishing high sch,,,,ol; he would have quit school to do so had he been allowed. But responding to his father's bombshell is only the first of a great many challenges Bailey must meet in the course of the story--hard work in difficult, sometimes life threatening circumstances not least among them. Bailey is surrounded by a handful of characters who are as vividly imagined as he is: his parents and younger sister and the Warrens, Tud and his son Booty, the latter more brother to Bailey than friend. R_obson, indeed, has fleshed out her characters and explored their interlocking relationships--all of which are changed during the course of this story--more fully than most authors can in twice as many pages. Robson's book explores the obligations of friendship and the bonds, stronger than rivalries and animosities, that hold together a community of people who need one another to survive--"e;the pull and haul of relationship, gift, and obligation."e; Like her characters, Robson grew up on the Chesapeake, and she worked for years as a deckhand on a coastal tug. (She tells her story in Woman in the Wheelhouse.) She couldn't have written this book the way she did without that experience. Readers like myself who aren't familiar with the life she describes--most of us, surely--will encounter some unfamiliar vocabulary here, but context is sufficient to get the meaning across. The first paragraph immerses the reader at once in the life of a Chesapeake waterman: "e;The trotline groaned over the roller as it came up out of the blue-black Elizabeth River on Maryland's Eastern Shore. Braced against the boat's wooden coaming, seventeen-year-old Bailey Kraft was poised, dip net ready, scanning for the bait twisted every eight feet or so into the mile-ong line. That was where the crab would be--if there were a crab. As he watched, a shadow rose from the dark water and came into focus, sharpening into olive shell and blue-green claws that clung to a frayed gray eel chunk tied to the line. When the crab broke the surface, Bailey leaned out, scooped it up, and dumped it into the bushel basket at his feet."e;