"Doan, a professor of early childhood education at Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia, presents a guide for those who care for people with Alzheimer’s disease.
The author draws from her professional experience as an early childhood educator and her personal experience as a caregiver in this book. Specifically, she shares lessons that she learned while caring for her mother, who struggled with Alzheimer’s disease for six years before her death. Doan explores the range of reactions people have to a dementia diagnosis, including denial, anger, frustration, depression, and even suicidality. A supportive community is crucial in these early stages, she says. She also shares how early childhood education techniques, such as observation, documentation, and a strength-based approach, can be incorporated into Alzheimer’s care. Establishing healthy boundaries and learning not to take things personally are key skills for caregivers, she notes, and she highlights the power of sharing stories, music, and nature walks as positive ways to connect. Pets and props, such as baby dolls or stuffed animals, may also comfort and engage loved ones, she writes. She offers tips on assisting patients with mouth care, feeding, and navigating transitions to higher levels of care. Practicing gratitude is offered as a strategy to deal with grief. The book concludes by urging caregivers to “put what you have learned into action” with Alzheimer’s-related organizations and other people in similar situations. Doan gracefully guides readers with real-life anecdotes, early childhood education insights, and actionable tips...the book deftly tackles a range of sensitive subjects, such as how family dynamics change after a diagnosis and how a loved one’s behavior may have caregivers “feeling awkward, embarrassed, or uncomfortable."
An empathetic approach to Alzheimer’s care that prioritizes personal experience over clinical perspectives."
The author draws from her professional experience as an early childhood educator and her personal experience as a caregiver in this book. Specifically, she shares lessons that she learned while caring for her mother, who struggled with Alzheimer’s disease for six years before her death. Doan explores the range of reactions people have to a dementia diagnosis, including denial, anger, frustration, depression, and even suicidality. A supportive community is crucial in these early stages, she says. She also shares how early childhood education techniques, such as observation, documentation, and a strength-based approach, can be incorporated into Alzheimer’s care. Establishing healthy boundaries and learning not to take things personally are key skills for caregivers, she notes, and she highlights the power of sharing stories, music, and nature walks as positive ways to connect. Pets and props, such as baby dolls or stuffed animals, may also comfort and engage loved ones, she writes. She offers tips on assisting patients with mouth care, feeding, and navigating transitions to higher levels of care. Practicing gratitude is offered as a strategy to deal with grief. The book concludes by urging caregivers to “put what you have learned into action” with Alzheimer’s-related organizations and other people in similar situations. Doan gracefully guides readers with real-life anecdotes, early childhood education insights, and actionable tips...the book deftly tackles a range of sensitive subjects, such as how family dynamics change after a diagnosis and how a loved one’s behavior may have caregivers “feeling awkward, embarrassed, or uncomfortable."
An empathetic approach to Alzheimer’s care that prioritizes personal experience over clinical perspectives."
─Kirkus Reviews
"There are books I read because I am asked to, and there are books I read because they have already been waiting for me. Laura K. Doan’s She’s Still My Mom turned out to be the second kind. I came to it as a book reviewer for the British Columbia Review and as a colleague of the author at Thompson Rivers University, where I serve as an Open Learning Faculty Member. I expected to read with the careful neutrality that scholarly review demands. Instead, somewhere around Chapter 18, I found myself sitting with a memory I had not visited in many years, of my grandfather in his last Alzheimer’s seasons, when there were no words left between us and no apparent understanding of who I was when I came to sit by him. Doan’s book reached back to that quiet room and gave me a vocabulary for what I had witnessed there. I closed the book changed, and that is the highest praise I know how to offer.
The book runs to 297 pages across nineteen chapters, each carefully scaffolded with what Doan calls Key Thoughts, Actions, Thought for Resilience, and Self-Care sections. This consistent pedagogical architecture is the first signal of what the book is doing methodologically. Dr. Doan, who holds a Doctor of Education from the University of Calgary and has been a professor of early childhood education at Thompson Rivers University for twenty-six years, brings the relational principles she learned and taught throughout her career into a different field of caregiving altogether.
The translation becomes most explicit in Chapter 8, which opens with an epigraph from Lynn Wilson’s canonical Canadian early childhood education textbook Partnerships: Families and Communities in Early Childhood (Wilson, 2024). Wilson writes that meaningful celebrations must always centre on the best interests of the children, and Doan asks her readers to apply the principle to family holidays with a loved one who has Alzheimer’s. Once I noticed this move, the book read differently. The yes environment she introduces in Chapter 7, a concept drawn directly from early childhood education that describes the practice of designing settings where the response to a person’s behaviour can be affirming rather than corrective, becomes the organizing principle of much of the practical guidance.
The central ethical claim that “we are the ones who need to adapt; not our loved one” (Doan, 2025, p. 105), and the gentle pedagogical scaffolding throughout, all reveal themselves as the work of a teacher carrying her vocation across two care fields that rarely speak to each other.
This translation is the book’s most distinctive contribution and also where its most productive tensions live. Tom Kitwood’s foundational scholarship in Dementia Reconsidered: The Person Comes First (1997) introduced the concept of personhood in dementia care, which describes the sustained recognition of a person with dementia as a full human being deserving of respect, dignity, and relational connection regardless of cognitive change. Kitwood warned specifically against what he called malignant social psychology, the patterns of well meaning but diminishing interaction that can reduce people with dementia to a developmental analogue of children.
To Doan’s credit, the practice she models is more thoughtful than the analogy alone might risk. The principles she carries across, including observation, dignity, and the discipline of meeting a person where they are, travel honourably across age groups. Still, the conversation she opens is one her book leaves for others to develop more fully, and as a doctoral candidate working at the intersection of participatory methods and human rights, I found myself wishing for a more sustained engagement with the personhood literature that her translation enters.
What Doan offers in place of theoretical engagement is something rarer in caregiving literature. She offers candour. She describes bringing her mother-in-law June home for Christmas and recognizing afterward that “it was our need to have June with us at Christmas, not her need” (Doan, 2025, p. 112). She writes that her own mother had never been what she would describe as a Hallmark Mom, naming her mother’s mental illness and earlier addiction without softening either (Doan, 2025, p. 229). This refusal of sentimentality is what gives the book its trustworthiness.
Doan is not asking the reader to love a tidy mother. She is asking the reader to keep loving a real one, through a disease that takes its time and takes a great deal.
The book carries this same honesty into its visual practice. Doan threads roughly seventy-three family photographs through the chapters, and the images do not function as decoration. They function as evidence, in a way that sits close to the photovoice tradition I work in, where photographs are treated as data that carry meaning the written word cannot reach on its own. A photograph of Doan’s mother with her granddaughter Sarah at a birthday party (Figure 65, p. 235) performs the book’s central claim about presence and continuing personhood far more persuasively than any argument could. A quieter image of her mother at a Starbucks window (Figure 31, p. 107) anchors the ordinary dailiness that caregiving is actually made of.
The book is also unmistakably grounded in British Columbia, and in the Interior in particular. Doan writes from and about Kamloops, and the institutions that appear in her account, including Interior Health, the Marjorie Willoughby Snowden Memorial Hospice Home, Family Caregivers of British Columbia, and the Alzheimer Society of B.C., give the book a local specificity that BC readers will recognize as their own. This is a caregiving book that knows where it stands.
Doan closes by turning outward, from the intimate to the rights-bearing. She brings her readers to the Canadian Charter of Rights for People with Dementia (Alzheimer Society of Canada, 2018), a document that insists people living with dementia retain the full rights of citizenship and personhood. It is a fitting close, because it lifts the book’s private tenderness into a public claim. The dignity Doan extends to her own mother is not a private courtesy. It is something every person living with dementia is owed.
A book this generous earns a wide readership. To family members at the beginning of the road, it will arrive as a map. To those further along, it will arrive as company. And to readers like me, who carry the inheritance of earlier dementia witnessing in our family histories, it will arrive as the gentle hand we did not know we were waiting for. Doan has written something her mother Mary Louise would, I think, have recognized as an act of love. Reading it, I remembered my grandfather. Reading it, I forgave the young person I had been who did not know what to do in his quiet room. That is the kind of gift this book turns out to be. Not a guidebook, although it teaches plenty. A companion. A hand offered across the years to those who are walking, or who once walked, or who will one day walk, the road of loving someone through Alzheimer’s. Pick it up. Sit with it. Let it find the rooms in your own life that may have grown quiet. She’s Still My Mom is the kind of book that, once read, you will want to give to people you love.
- Amy Tucker, the British Columbia Review
The book runs to 297 pages across nineteen chapters, each carefully scaffolded with what Doan calls Key Thoughts, Actions, Thought for Resilience, and Self-Care sections. This consistent pedagogical architecture is the first signal of what the book is doing methodologically. Dr. Doan, who holds a Doctor of Education from the University of Calgary and has been a professor of early childhood education at Thompson Rivers University for twenty-six years, brings the relational principles she learned and taught throughout her career into a different field of caregiving altogether.
The translation becomes most explicit in Chapter 8, which opens with an epigraph from Lynn Wilson’s canonical Canadian early childhood education textbook Partnerships: Families and Communities in Early Childhood (Wilson, 2024). Wilson writes that meaningful celebrations must always centre on the best interests of the children, and Doan asks her readers to apply the principle to family holidays with a loved one who has Alzheimer’s. Once I noticed this move, the book read differently. The yes environment she introduces in Chapter 7, a concept drawn directly from early childhood education that describes the practice of designing settings where the response to a person’s behaviour can be affirming rather than corrective, becomes the organizing principle of much of the practical guidance.
The central ethical claim that “we are the ones who need to adapt; not our loved one” (Doan, 2025, p. 105), and the gentle pedagogical scaffolding throughout, all reveal themselves as the work of a teacher carrying her vocation across two care fields that rarely speak to each other.
This translation is the book’s most distinctive contribution and also where its most productive tensions live. Tom Kitwood’s foundational scholarship in Dementia Reconsidered: The Person Comes First (1997) introduced the concept of personhood in dementia care, which describes the sustained recognition of a person with dementia as a full human being deserving of respect, dignity, and relational connection regardless of cognitive change. Kitwood warned specifically against what he called malignant social psychology, the patterns of well meaning but diminishing interaction that can reduce people with dementia to a developmental analogue of children.
To Doan’s credit, the practice she models is more thoughtful than the analogy alone might risk. The principles she carries across, including observation, dignity, and the discipline of meeting a person where they are, travel honourably across age groups. Still, the conversation she opens is one her book leaves for others to develop more fully, and as a doctoral candidate working at the intersection of participatory methods and human rights, I found myself wishing for a more sustained engagement with the personhood literature that her translation enters.
What Doan offers in place of theoretical engagement is something rarer in caregiving literature. She offers candour. She describes bringing her mother-in-law June home for Christmas and recognizing afterward that “it was our need to have June with us at Christmas, not her need” (Doan, 2025, p. 112). She writes that her own mother had never been what she would describe as a Hallmark Mom, naming her mother’s mental illness and earlier addiction without softening either (Doan, 2025, p. 229). This refusal of sentimentality is what gives the book its trustworthiness.
Doan is not asking the reader to love a tidy mother. She is asking the reader to keep loving a real one, through a disease that takes its time and takes a great deal.
The book carries this same honesty into its visual practice. Doan threads roughly seventy-three family photographs through the chapters, and the images do not function as decoration. They function as evidence, in a way that sits close to the photovoice tradition I work in, where photographs are treated as data that carry meaning the written word cannot reach on its own. A photograph of Doan’s mother with her granddaughter Sarah at a birthday party (Figure 65, p. 235) performs the book’s central claim about presence and continuing personhood far more persuasively than any argument could. A quieter image of her mother at a Starbucks window (Figure 31, p. 107) anchors the ordinary dailiness that caregiving is actually made of.
The book is also unmistakably grounded in British Columbia, and in the Interior in particular. Doan writes from and about Kamloops, and the institutions that appear in her account, including Interior Health, the Marjorie Willoughby Snowden Memorial Hospice Home, Family Caregivers of British Columbia, and the Alzheimer Society of B.C., give the book a local specificity that BC readers will recognize as their own. This is a caregiving book that knows where it stands.
Doan closes by turning outward, from the intimate to the rights-bearing. She brings her readers to the Canadian Charter of Rights for People with Dementia (Alzheimer Society of Canada, 2018), a document that insists people living with dementia retain the full rights of citizenship and personhood. It is a fitting close, because it lifts the book’s private tenderness into a public claim. The dignity Doan extends to her own mother is not a private courtesy. It is something every person living with dementia is owed.
A book this generous earns a wide readership. To family members at the beginning of the road, it will arrive as a map. To those further along, it will arrive as company. And to readers like me, who carry the inheritance of earlier dementia witnessing in our family histories, it will arrive as the gentle hand we did not know we were waiting for. Doan has written something her mother Mary Louise would, I think, have recognized as an act of love. Reading it, I remembered my grandfather. Reading it, I forgave the young person I had been who did not know what to do in his quiet room. That is the kind of gift this book turns out to be. Not a guidebook, although it teaches plenty. A companion. A hand offered across the years to those who are walking, or who once walked, or who will one day walk, the road of loving someone through Alzheimer’s. Pick it up. Sit with it. Let it find the rooms in your own life that may have grown quiet. She’s Still My Mom is the kind of book that, once read, you will want to give to people you love.
- Amy Tucker, the British Columbia Review
"What can I say? This book is beautifully and sensitively written. It tells of a daughter’s love for her mother. I was hooked from the first page, and both cried and laughed with Laura, as I was reading. She’s Still my Mom will resonate with anyone that knows, has known or is currently caring for a loved one with dementia. While it is all too easy to focus on the diagnosis, Laura reminds us, that the person involved, is still very much alive. Using a practical strengths-based approach, Laura affirms the person with dementia, acknowledges human frailty from the perspective of the cared for, and those doing the caring and provides a myriad of tips and strategies to help all involved experience joy in their everyday lives. The stories bring Laura’s journey with her mother to life. I could literally feel the sunshine, taste the tea, hear the breeze, the rustle of leaves, the ripple of water on those many walks. I could also hear the laughter, and the conversations, and I could experience all the emotions: joy, sadness, hope. The book reinforces the critical importance of positive relationships and connection throughout the life span. Thank you, Laura, for sharing your story!"
─Dr. Mary Moloney, Associate Professor, Early Childhood Education and Care,
Mary Immaculate College, Limerick, Ireland
Mary Immaculate College, Limerick, Ireland
"In the book, She’s Still My Mom, Laura Doan recounts her experiences of caring for a mother with Alzheimer’s disease. The book focuses on the relationship between mother and daughter, exploring themes of love, memory, and identity.
She’s Still My Mom details Laura’s (and family) life as she cares for her mother, from initial diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease to her mom’s passing. The memoir consists of short stories that depict various moments and memories, illustrating their relationship's challenges and rewards. Throughout the book, Laura candidly shares her difficulties, fears, and positive experiences and describes strategies on how to adapt to changes occurring with their loved one.
Alzheimer’s disease is often referred to as “the long goodbye” because it gradually erases a person's memories. As Laura explains, “For me, saying goodbye has been ongoing, even if I haven’t been aware of it.” Laura navigates this loss while witnessing her mother’s decline, but also finds comfort in the lasting memories. The memoir examines the nature of memory and how identities are shaped by shared stories and experiences.
Caring for a loved one with Alzheimer’s disease requires significant amount of strength and resilience. Laura’s memoir demonstrates her capability to manage the caregiver's emotional and physical demands. She discusses her coping mechanisms, including finding humour in certain moments and seeking support from friends and family. Her account highlights that even in difficult times, there can be moments of grace and beauty.
She’s Still My Mom is a beautiful exploration of love, memory, and resilience. Laura’s story highlights the enduring bond between mother and daughter while finding the strength and grace in challenging circumstances. This book is a must-read for anyone who has been touched by Alzheimer’s disease."
She’s Still My Mom details Laura’s (and family) life as she cares for her mother, from initial diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease to her mom’s passing. The memoir consists of short stories that depict various moments and memories, illustrating their relationship's challenges and rewards. Throughout the book, Laura candidly shares her difficulties, fears, and positive experiences and describes strategies on how to adapt to changes occurring with their loved one.
Alzheimer’s disease is often referred to as “the long goodbye” because it gradually erases a person's memories. As Laura explains, “For me, saying goodbye has been ongoing, even if I haven’t been aware of it.” Laura navigates this loss while witnessing her mother’s decline, but also finds comfort in the lasting memories. The memoir examines the nature of memory and how identities are shaped by shared stories and experiences.
Caring for a loved one with Alzheimer’s disease requires significant amount of strength and resilience. Laura’s memoir demonstrates her capability to manage the caregiver's emotional and physical demands. She discusses her coping mechanisms, including finding humour in certain moments and seeking support from friends and family. Her account highlights that even in difficult times, there can be moments of grace and beauty.
She’s Still My Mom is a beautiful exploration of love, memory, and resilience. Laura’s story highlights the enduring bond between mother and daughter while finding the strength and grace in challenging circumstances. This book is a must-read for anyone who has been touched by Alzheimer’s disease."
─Heather Noyes, RRT, BHSc, MEd., Associate Teaching Professor (retired)
"In this very personal and practical guide, Dr. Laura Doan shares frankly and deeply about her own experience of navigating a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease in both her mother and her mother-in-law. Dr. Doan has experienced many facets of this journey and shares them openly here. In short, readable chapters, she candidly talks about topics such as: changing communication styles in your loved one, navigating holidays and outings, changing behaviours, family dynamics, grief, and much more. Each chapter relates Dr. Doan’s own experiences as well as offering many practical ideas for the reader. An abundance of personal photos document each story and bring a personal, relatable feel to the book. This is a compassionate and helpful guidebook offering support, understanding, and practical suggestions for those dealing with a loved one with an Alzheimer’s diagnosis."
─Beverley Knight, BMus, ARCT (Performance), BCRMT, Piano Teacher
"If I am honest, I was very excited to read this book due to my own recent experience of walking though dementia with my mum. At the same time, I was hesitant: what if I read something that I could have, should have done and didn't and never will be able to now? I was so relieved that this was not the case. This book presents recent evidence base regarding dementia, but even more than that and most importantly for me, it is like a kind friend walking the journey with you. Caring for a loved one with dementia is tough and so emotional. It unlocks emotions and feelings you didn't recognise were there. This is a book written by someone who "gets it". It feels like a caring hug and a listening ear. Laura provides practical support in every aspect of dementia and what it means to live daily caring for someone with a dementia diagnosis. I loved the self care points at the end of each chapter. It is a book to keep handy and dip into, as each chapter stands alone. In the lay out of the book, it seems that Laura acknowledges the all-consuming role of carer and how reading a lengthy book may be overwhelming. Each chapter is succinct and has a summary of the main points at the end. It is packed full of personal experience which makes it very relatable."
─Ruth Aves, RGN, RSCN, Specialist Infant Feeding Health Visitor
"Thank you, Laura, for sharing your story in such an authentic, open and honest way. Your reflections of your experiences will be of great support to many who have faced similar challenges and for those who may be starting out on this journey. The photographs that you share throughout the journey are beautiful and I’m sure will provide lasting and cherished memories for you and your family.
The way you have made the connections with your profession as an early years educator and working with children is interesting, and your reflections after each chapter provides practical support to anyone reading your story. You have ensured that we mange our own self-care as well as needing to support our loved ones. I love the idea of a ‘yes environment’ that you weave throughout the chapters that offers positivity, guidance and support and has a focus on needing to adapt environments and not expect our loved ones to change. "
The way you have made the connections with your profession as an early years educator and working with children is interesting, and your reflections after each chapter provides practical support to anyone reading your story. You have ensured that we mange our own self-care as well as needing to support our loved ones. I love the idea of a ‘yes environment’ that you weave throughout the chapters that offers positivity, guidance and support and has a focus on needing to adapt environments and not expect our loved ones to change. "
─Dr Alison Moore, PhD, MA, NPQICL, BA, Professional Practice Placement Manager
University College Cork, Ireland
University College Cork, Ireland
"I was honoured when Dr. Doan asked if I would read and review her new book She’s Still My Mom: Navigating your loved one’s journey with Alzheimer’s. As she relates in her book, Dr. Doan received a number of suggestions from friends that she turn the many reflections, anecdotes and realizations she shared about her mom’s journey, into a book. I was one of them. I recall looking forward to her next post knowing that I was being granted entry into a deeply personal story about Alzheimer’s. It was also very honest and extremely beautiful. This book is a broader, deeper version of that Alzheimer’s story and is, at its core, a love story.
The book is a joy to read. It is autobiographical, spiritual, and uplifting. It is framed in such a way that it is an easy to digest tutorial on Alzheimer’s and how to respond to and care for those with dementia / Alzheimer’s with kindness and compassion. Dr. Doan provides a summary at the end of each chapter that guides the reader through Key Thoughts, Actions, Thought for Resilience and Self-Care. Dr. Doan makes the connection between what she had learned in her role as an Early Childhood Education teacher and educator and how that has informed her “way of being” with her mom.
Beneath a picture of Dr. Doan and her mom at the beginning of Chapter Two, Dr. Doan notes “… While I am the author of this book, I could not have written it without my mom. This photo represents a journey that we were on together…. ”. This book, as well as the reflections that formed the basis of the book, are driven by the path that Dr. Doan’s mom led them on. As you open this book, let her lead you too.
I wish that She’s Still My Mom: Navigating Your Loved One’s Journey With Alzheimer’s had been written before I started working with individuals with dementia and Alzheimer’s (including Dr. Doan’s mother in law). I know that I would have treated this book as a tutorial in my day-to-day work. Now that I have moved on to working in Addictions and Mental Health, my own mother is on her journey with Vascular Dementia, and I am so grateful to have this book as a resource and a lesson in grace.
If you work with individuals with dementia / Alzheimer’s or if you have a loved one with dementia / Alzheimer’s – buy this book. It will guide you, inspire you and empower you in your journey."
The book is a joy to read. It is autobiographical, spiritual, and uplifting. It is framed in such a way that it is an easy to digest tutorial on Alzheimer’s and how to respond to and care for those with dementia / Alzheimer’s with kindness and compassion. Dr. Doan provides a summary at the end of each chapter that guides the reader through Key Thoughts, Actions, Thought for Resilience and Self-Care. Dr. Doan makes the connection between what she had learned in her role as an Early Childhood Education teacher and educator and how that has informed her “way of being” with her mom.
Beneath a picture of Dr. Doan and her mom at the beginning of Chapter Two, Dr. Doan notes “… While I am the author of this book, I could not have written it without my mom. This photo represents a journey that we were on together…. ”. This book, as well as the reflections that formed the basis of the book, are driven by the path that Dr. Doan’s mom led them on. As you open this book, let her lead you too.
I wish that She’s Still My Mom: Navigating Your Loved One’s Journey With Alzheimer’s had been written before I started working with individuals with dementia and Alzheimer’s (including Dr. Doan’s mother in law). I know that I would have treated this book as a tutorial in my day-to-day work. Now that I have moved on to working in Addictions and Mental Health, my own mother is on her journey with Vascular Dementia, and I am so grateful to have this book as a resource and a lesson in grace.
If you work with individuals with dementia / Alzheimer’s or if you have a loved one with dementia / Alzheimer’s – buy this book. It will guide you, inspire you and empower you in your journey."
─Darlene Gibson, BA
Support Services Manager
A New Tomorrow Treatment Solutions
Support Services Manager
A New Tomorrow Treatment Solutions
“She’s Still My Mom is a rare book that unites academic rigor with sensitivity and sound advice for people caring for or living with a person with Alzheimer’s. The author makes good use of her background and solid knowledge as a professor in early childhood education at the Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, BC, Canada, which allows her to draw numerous parallelisms between the needs of small children and those of elderly with dementia and other neurodegenerative diseases. The idea of care is the main thread of the book. Care for the ill, care for the caregiver, care for family and kin. The book is sprinkled with practical tips on how to practice it through physical activity, music, faith, cooking. As a keen cook herself, she even offers the recipes of her mom’s favourite treats! Indeed, the word that the reader will come across most often is ‘love’. Professor Doan manages to use it generously without losing her rigor, providing it with a deeper, transcendental meaning. She is honest and open about her experience with her loved ones, not hesitating to share painful episodes. As an academic, she has documented the most minute details but offers them with warmth and affection. These details and how she sees, deals with and interprets them is what makes this book a very useful tool for those now struggling with similar situations. After reading it, I am quite certain the reader will end with a sigh and a smile. Thank you very much for writing it!”
─Dr. Katia Hueso, PhD., MSc Biology,
teacher, author and consultant on nature education,
conservation, sustainability and environmental management,
Adjunct Professor at the Comillas Pontifical University in Spain
teacher, author and consultant on nature education,
conservation, sustainability and environmental management,
Adjunct Professor at the Comillas Pontifical University in Spain
"Doan shares her experiences of navigating her mother’s Alzheimer’s journey with remarkable honesty and grace. The book sheds light on the challenges and triumphs faced by caregivers, family members, and observers alike. Doan’s approach is both relatable and insightful, offering practical tools and strategies that resonate deeply with her readers. Her background as an early childhood educator, mother, and daughter adds a unique perspective, enriching the narrative with wisdom and empathy. This book is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the complexities of Alzheimer's and the profound impact it has on families."
─Nicole Matthew, BBA
“Weaving years of education experience with an evolving relationship as daughter and caregiver, Laura shares the journey with her mom in ways that encourage all of us who work with, care for and love those living with Alzheimer’s. Laura acknowledges the very real struggle caregivers face entangled beautifully with the gentleness, patience and love people deserve. As a caregiver myself, I consider this book a must-read for anyone who loves/works with someone living with Alzheimer’s, Dementia, and other life-altering diseases. It is reassuring to see my work in this light, to feel the privilege and responsibility of caregiving, promoting dignity and humanity, and learning self-care and resilience-building strategies that promote the important work we do professionally and within the contexts of our loved ones.”
─Anna Hendra, Private Caregiver
"As someone who has walked the complex Alzheimer’s journey with my own mother, I appreciated the honest, gentle and practical approach Laura Doan took in her book, She’s Still My Mom. I am also a longtime friend of Laura and her family, and I have many fond memories of Mary playing her violin, singing, hosting childhood birthday parties, and sharing her poetry. Reading this book brought back a lot of those memories and also helped me gain some new perspectives on my own experience as a daughter of someone who lived with Alzheimer’s. Laura does not downplay the challenges that caregivers face, and I found the approaches from the Early Childhood Education (ECE) context she suggests to be very insightful. They offer a helpful model to follow as they navigate the ever-changing nature of this condition.
Everybody’s experience of Alzheimer’s or dementia is unique, yet there are definitely many aspects that caregivers have in common. She’s Still My Mom explores the bittersweet tension that everyone who watches a loved one progress through various stages of this condition–you see the person you know and love as well as this new person who may seem like someone you may not recognize. Laura describes various ways that caregivers and family members can continue to honour loved ones throughout a difficult journey. Her vulnerability allows readers to enter into her story and provides a way for people living with this reality to share in her joy and sorrow.
I would recommend this book to anyone wanting to understand more about the realities of caring for a loved one with dementia. It provides helpful approaches but also explores the emotional impact on loved ones as well. Laura is authentic and gentle in her writing style and readers will enjoy the stories she shares about her family’s experience with this condition."
Everybody’s experience of Alzheimer’s or dementia is unique, yet there are definitely many aspects that caregivers have in common. She’s Still My Mom explores the bittersweet tension that everyone who watches a loved one progress through various stages of this condition–you see the person you know and love as well as this new person who may seem like someone you may not recognize. Laura describes various ways that caregivers and family members can continue to honour loved ones throughout a difficult journey. Her vulnerability allows readers to enter into her story and provides a way for people living with this reality to share in her joy and sorrow.
I would recommend this book to anyone wanting to understand more about the realities of caring for a loved one with dementia. It provides helpful approaches but also explores the emotional impact on loved ones as well. Laura is authentic and gentle in her writing style and readers will enjoy the stories she shares about her family’s experience with this condition."
- L. Wickett, BA, B.Ed, MSD
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