Introduction

There are people who try hard to forget their problems. All Ruby wants to do is remember...

Ruby Donaldson has been diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's Disease, and she'll be damned if she won't straighten out her troubled family before she no longer knows how.

Ruby spent years fighting to hold on to the home her grandmother built on Ward's Island. The only way she can ensure that her younger, mentally scarred daughter Grace can live there for the rest of her life is to convince her older daughter, Liz, to sober up and come home.

Ruby always thought she'd have a lifetime to make things right, but suddenly time is running out. She has to put her broken family back together quickly while searching for a way to deal with the inevitable- and do it with all the grit, stubbornness, and unstoppable determination that makes Ruby who she is...until she's Ruby no longer.

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Excerpt

Ruby
If I were a teenager, this would be a coming of age story. But having celebrated my fiftyfifth
birthday yesterday -complete with champagne, cake, and more candles than anyone
wants to see in one place -I suppose this is more a coming of old age story. The tale of a
woman well aware that the best is no longer yet to come. Proud that all the years of
canoeing and weight training and green tea have given her firn1 arms, a straight back and
a heart so strong the little darling will probably beat for years and years to come. Yet
knowing with aching clarity that none of these things will stop, or even slow, the
inevitable decline before her.
Fortunately, it's not all bad news. As those thoughtful cards from the Humorous Birthday section of the Hallmark store pointed out, I may be Over The Hill and Past My Best Before Date, but I am also officially a Junior Senior now, entitling me to a free coffee refill at Donut King and a ten percent discount on power tools this week at the hardware store on Sherbourne. Pity I swore off coffee twenty years ago and already have a shed fuJJ of tools courtesy of Jack Hoyle -the man who finished renovating my second floor bedroom yesterday, and shared it with me last night after the party. ... view entire excerpt...

Discussion Questions

From the author:

1. As a single working mom with two kids and the sole caregiver for her cantankerous grandmother, Ruby had to be tough and she had to make decisions that weren’t always popular. It’s the kind of situation many working moms find themselves in, and years later, they scold themselves for being too strict, or too rigid. Certainly, Liz blames her mother for everything that is wrong with the family, but is that fair? In spite of their problems, was Ruby a good mother? Does she deserve forgiveness? Or was every move she made calculated to keep Grace at home? To save Ruby from being alone?
2. The issues that arise when illness strikes a loved one are never easy, but with Alzheimer’s the problems become even more complicated. Taking care of someone with Alzheimer’s is a twenty-four hour a day, seven days a week job, but whose job is it? The daughter-in-law who was always the target of a jealous mother-in-law’s insults? The son who is closest geographically but the least able to cope financially? And for how long must you commit to the job? How much of your life do you owe to a parent or someone else’s loved one? And when is it time to say, enough?
3. Should we have the right to decide our futures when confronted with terminal illness? If not, why not? If so, how do you decide when the time is right? And who holds the burden of seeing that your wishes are carried out?

Weblinks

»	Publisher's Book Info
»	Author Lynda Simmons' web site

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