Looking Back, Moving Forward - Bittersweet

When lawyer, wife and mother Candace Wayne’s beloved husband John is diagnosed with Lewy Bodies Dementia, she finally has a name for the small changes she’s born witness to for years. In this essay collection, Candace offers snapshots of the years leading up to John’s death, and those that unfold afterward. Task-oriented and responsible, Candace is efficient in her role as caretaker, learning how to best support a husband who must come to terms with his slow-creeping loss of self-sufficiency. Meanwhile, Candace’s daughters have their own experience with their father’s changes, and the whole family must bend without breaking to accommodate his loss. By turns raw and contemplative, Candace’s essays depict family road trips, restaurant outings, and doctors appointments, and finally John’s last breaths. Much like Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, this collection is true to the experience of mourning, taking the reader through the author’s real-time experiences before revisiting episodes through the lens of retrospect. Ultimately, the author’s sadness makes way for reluctant optimism as Candace awakens to the bittersweet realization that the person her husband’s death caused her to become is a woman she’s grateful to know.