This Sunday, Calloway County Library and the Murray-Calloway Endowment for Health Care present a community read of The End of Your Life Book Club by Will Schwalbe. Constance Alexander and Sandy Linn join Kate Lochte on Sounds Good with a preview of the event, insight into the grant funding an effort to focus on the needs of the elderly and their caregivers through the arts and their impressions of the book.
The Calloway County Endowment for Health Care received an arts access grant from the Kentucky Arts Council with a focus on the needs of the elderly and their caregivers through a series of arts activities, events and exhibitions, with an emphasis on caregivers. Constance Alexander says sometimes the situation can be more taxing on the caregiver than on the patient. The grant aims to bring awareness to those providing care in a community considered underserved.
This effort kicked of in late August with the Playhouse in the Park production Grace and Glorie, a comedic drama about a hospice patient and her volunteer caregiver. This was followed by a community forum in November, which brought together experts (through a partnership with Town & Gown and the public library) to talk about care giving. Alexander says 60 people came and while some of the questions were challenging, it shed light on the issues caregivers face and that the conversation was substantive.
This Sunday (January 11) from 2:30 to 4 p.m. in the Calloway County Meeting Room there will be a community discussion about the book The End of Your Life Book Club by Will Schwalbe. Free copies of the book are available to the first fifty people who register at the library's circulation desk.
Looking ahead, Alexander says Debi Danielson of the Murray Art Guild is exhibiting a series of photographs of caregivers and the people they are caring for later this spring. The photos will then be donated to the Hospice House. The Jackson Purchase Dance Company is working with seniors to choreograph a dance to be filmed by Murray Electric and hosted on the local cable channel. Alexander says she is working to screen the film Alive Inside by Music and Memory, which shows how music can reach people very deep within dementia and other serious illnesses.