New book details harsh toll of Alzheimer’s on caregivers

“I have spent close to two decades trying to decipher what’s going on in my husband’s head. His disease is my crossword puzzle,” Meryl Comer writes in her book “Slow Dancing With a Stranger: Lost and Found in the Age of Alzheimer’s.”

Comer has spent years caring for not one but two Alzheimer’s patients (in a heartbreaking twist of fate, her mother was diagnosed with the disease as well). At 48, Comer gave up her career as a journalist, TV producer and business talk show host to become a full-time caregiver with all the stress, fear, fury, sorrow and exhaustion that entails.

Writing the book, she says, was not cathartic — but it was necessary. It’s also charitable: 100 percent of the book’s proceeds will go toward Alzheimer’s research.

— Connie Ogle, Miami Herald