Mary Moreland Shares 'The Gap Between: Loving and Supporting Someone with Alzheimer's'

In The Gap Between: Loving and Supporting Someone with Alzheimer’s, lawyer and debut author, Mary Moreland, provides readers with an insightful resource for those caring for a loved one with Alzheimer’s disease. Structured by theme, her book includes direction and advice on how to manage and care for the sick loved one, challenges they may come across as they encounter each stage of the illness, and her own personal journey caring for her mother with Alzheimer’s. She explained, “Every chapter has a certain theme, like diagnosis or legal documentation or end of life, caregiving, and then there’s a memoir section within each chapter about that theme, which talks about the actual reality of what our life was like, how we dealt with certain problems… and then there’s a tip section, which is a researched section… and I put a poem of my mother’s in between each chapter because I thought, there are a lot of books that talk about the story of me and my loved one with dementia and I haven’t read all those books but the ones that I’ve looked at, you kind of get to know the narrator and you kind of get to know the person as that person was with dementia, but you don’t really get to see what that person was like before his or her mind started deteriorating and my mom was a great writer. She won some literary awards. She was published in a few literary magazines and I thought by including them, the juxtaposition of the poems which are very thoughtful and then the memoir section about the same person not having the abilities that she used to have, I thought that that was really powerful…and I think somehow the poems really match up with the chapters.”

Near the end of her life, Moreland’s mother was eventually moved into hospice care and then finally to memory care, where she eventually passed away. Moreland elaborated on her misconceptions of hospice and how much hospice care helped her and her mom feel at ease when the disease became a struggle to manage. “I always thought hospice was only when you’re on death’s door, but what I learned with Alzheimer’s, you can actually qualify for hospice before that and in fact, a lot of people who lived on her floor had been on hospice for awhile… when hospice finally came in… they just came in with so much knowledge and advice and hospice is also not only for the person who’s ill, but it’s also for the others too and they were very helpful to me…[my mother] stopped eating, she stopped drinking, I didn’t really understand what was going on with the body… but they were very helpful in explaining to me what was going on, what to expect, how to make her most comfortable. “