Dundurn | Discover a new story

Sometimes, when life and art overlap it’s a happy synchronicity. Other times not so happy when a friend experiences an over-long recovery from COVID and her doctor has nothing to suggest. She typed, “We can’t garden without needing naps; we can’t take walks; even grocery shopping leaves us all exhausted for days. You know about managing fatigue from your character Jan in those Falls books. Can you suggest anything we can try?”

Tony and I are writers, so when life lobbed us a hardball, we went to our desks and wrote it all out: the fears, the doubts, the questions. Four Umbrellas: A Couple’s Journey Into Young-Onset Alzheimer’s is the result.

It was a three-year project, and in many ways the process helped us cope. Tony explains:

A girl I went to school with disappeared. Nobody talked about what happened to her, but years later it was revealed that she’d joined a cult. I was intrigued. What exactly is a cult? Why do people join them? Why do they stay? What happens if they try to leave? How do they heal afterward?