AS MY PARENTS AGE

Reflections on Life, Love, and Change

Cynthia Ruchti, Worthy Inspired, Hardcover $14.99 (224pp), 978-1-61795-752-9

Caring for aging parents is a reality for many people. It can be very difficult to watch our once strong and active parents decline and need more and more care, be it financial, physical, or emotional. As My Parents Age, by Cynthia Ruchti, award-winning Christian author and speaker, offers comfort to those who seek to find peace and meaning in this often heart-wrenching process.

Each of the forty brief chapters in the book discusses a different aspect of taking care of aging parents, from helping parents who do not welcome the help, to dealing with a parent who has changed into someone unrecognizable or even unlikable, to life after parents have passed on. Each chapter includes references to the Bible that are relevant for Christians trying to understand what their role should be and how they can best provide care. Each chapter ends with a prayer.

Though the book is over three hundred pages in length, it is a remarkably fast and easy read. The author has a clear voice and message. The love expressed in each of the stories the author has shared—stories from many different people dealing with many different situations—offers universal comfort and hope. There is also some very practical advice: “When aging parents change the family dynamic, the family that finds a way to talk it out respectfully and discovers a good balance of emotional and physical workload stays together.”

This book is going to appeal primarily to Christians, but anyone who has ever faced taking care of an aging loved one will find something familiar in this book. That familiarity is itself a comfort. Others have gone through the difficulties of taking care of someone else, and the message here is that with patience and love, anyone can get through it.