| In September of 2005, Abbie Johnson married Bill Taylor. She was in her mid-forties, and he was nineteen years older. Three months later, Bill suffered the first of two strokes that paralyzed his left side and confined him to a wheelchair. Abbie Johnson Taylor uses prose and poetry to tell the story of how she met and married her husband and then how she cared for him for six years despite her visual impairment.At first, there was a glimmer of hope that Bill would walk again, but when therapists gave up on him seven months after his second stroke, Taylor resigned herself to being a permanent family caregiver. She discusses trials and tribulations: learning to dress him and transfer him from one place to another, sitting up with him at night when he couldn’t pee or move his bowels or because of other medical problems, battling doctors and bureaucrats to obtain necessary equipment and services, purchasing a wheelchair accessible van and finding someone to drive them so they wouldn’t always depend on the local paratransit service’s limited hours.In the end, she describes the painful decision she and Bill made to move him to a nursing home when he became too weak for her to care for him in September of 2012. He seemed to give up on life after that and passed away a month later. |  |
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