Mary Moller is a program specialist at the Center of Excellence for Alzheimer's Disease. She's spent fourteen years working with families shattered by the diagnosis of this and other forms of dementia. I would imagine laboring in such a field requires the sort of distancing mechanisms that limit emotional investment and empathy. You must stand at a remove, I suspect, as the victims swell in number and circumstance; boundaries firm as you deliver what expertise you can to those destined to decline from this point forward.
That makes sense. But here, again, we have a situation in which an adjustment must be made. The writing of a book, any book, necessitates the lowering of those protective walls and the closing of those distances in order to effectively connect with a reader. This is, at its heart, a one-on-one enterprise that greatly benefits from the personal touch. Expertise is more gratefully received on the page when it arrives in the form of intimate knowledge; direction more welcome when tendered through the balm of a manifestly-evident compassion.
While Ms. Moller's guide makes good on its promise to walk one through the stages of Alzheimer's Disease - what to say, what to expect, what to do - that guidance is supplied in a workaday tone that is nothing short of institutional. This is what one might expect from a pamphlet offered by the local public health service. And when you've gone to the trouble to research all the material available on such a hard and heartless disease, when you've expended the effort to select, then purchase, then read the book as you crest the wave of this nightmare, well, I think you deserve more than what you'd get from an employee of the state.
Boundaries may be the wisest choice in the nine-to-five travail of the job, they simply don't work here.