Winter Stars: An Elderly Mother, an Aging Son, and Life’s Final Journey

Documentarian Iverson debuts with a deeply moving account of the “ten-year caregiving odyssey” he and his mother embarked on before her death at age 105. The author’s mother, Adelaide, was a formidable woman who lived on her own until the age of 95. But when a debilitating case of pneumonia left her unable to manage alone, 59-year-old Iverson moved back into his childhood home to assist her in her final years. “I never imagined,” he writes, that “my mom would live for another full decade.” As Iverson recounts in heartrending scenes, those 10 years were never without their difficulties or lacking in moments of clarity: “I didn’t know that someone with dementia can still be poetic, or that I’d get proficient at transferring my mom from bed to commode and back again.” Iverson’s unadorned prose depicts further turmoil—including the news that his brother, like him, had Parkinson’s disease, the same malady that their father died of—but there are also glimmers of joy, such as the time he spent with the “remarkable women caregivers” who helped him with his mother and “became my teachers... and my kin.” This cannily conveys the nuances of living with and loving someone at the end of their life. (Mar.)