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In sickness and in health. Too often people are quick to forget that part of their marriage vows. We even saw the case from down in Florida a few years back where the husband basically had food withheld from his wife so she would die faster, in spite of protests from her parents, while he was working on his new girlfriend.
We personally have seen people who would have a much better quality of life if they could be kept at home. Instead, they waste away in a semi-private room at a nursing home while their lives tick away.
The Best Seven Years of My Life: The Story of an Unlikely Caregiver by George Shannon and Chad Patrick Shannon is the story of one man who realized too late that he had been treating his wife wrong for most of their married life. It is the story of regret and an attempt to somehow make it right.
This is also a story that shows how blessed this family really was. The author does not tell us whether or not the family realized in all of this how truly blessed they were. They did talk about being blessed with family and friends.
What isn’t mentioned is how blessed this family was to have resources to help them provide for the wife and mother during her final years. The family had the financial resources to move and remodel homes. The husband was blessed in that he had a business he could run from his home and take care of his ailing wife.
The family was blessed with a friend who could get a private plane to Mexico to fly the wife back home after her stroke. Most people don’t have that kind of resources.
This is a story that tells of a family who is going through a tremendous amount of pain, while feeling a tremendous amount of guilt over coulda, shoulda, woulda.
If there is any “Just One Take Away” from The Best Seven Years of My Life, it would have to be, “stop and smell the roses” or “you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone”. George realized too late that it did not matter if the magazines caused clutter. He realized that when we stand before God, He is not going to ask us how neat our house was, how nice our yard looked, how good we did in business, or what our golf score was.
Having suffered three stokes and a diabetic coma myself, I know that having family around, and good positive talk going on, is important. The patient can hear and understand you even if they cannot communicate with you.
George also learned how important good diet was to his wife’s well-being and recovery.
This story is much different from all the others we have been sent to review. It does not talk about all the red tape it takes to get a loved one treated. It does not talk about having to fight to get bad nurses taken off the case. It did not talk about having to wait for hours while insurance and Medicare had to be worked out. It does not talk about having to wait for days without eating because of being NPO for surgery because it takes days to arrange for a Medicaid-approved ambulance to be found.
It is a very good story of a man growing more and more in love with his wife and realizing how he hadn’t understood where she was coming from before. It is a story of a man realizing that the things that frustrated him the most about his wife were her ways of showing him how much she trusted him to take care of her.
This is a story of how one man took his wedding vows seriously and learned more about “In sickness and in health” than most people ever do. You need to buy The Best Seven Years of My Life today.
We were sent a complimentary copy of this book. We are under no obligation to write any review, positive or negative.
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