Local memoirist recounts agonies of caregiving

Veteran trial attorney Daniel P. Shapiro was preparing to publish his first book — an account of his years-long caretaking of his wife, who sustained a series of serious neurologic injuries and became increasingly incapacitated. A friend who read the work commented, “You know, it doesn’t make you look like a hero.”

Instead, The Thin Ledge: A Husband’s Memoir of Love, Trauma, and Unexpected Circumstances (River Grove Books), shares Shapiro’s experience of how life can be more fragile than he’d believed.

The longtime Highland Park resident wrote this memoir to “give me a way to think about the emotions” of being partner to a woman who was no longer the smart, strong, and vivacious girl he met when they were students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Maybe, the author said, his experiences would help others managing similar plights.

Around 40, his wife — to whom he refers as “Susan,” to preserve her privacy — transformed from a successful businessperson, loving wife, and engaged mother of three to a seemingly dour and often bedridden patient who watched endless hours of daytime TV.

Shapiro adapted as best he could, hiring household help so that he could continue working to support his family, even as he straightened his daughter’s hair, prepared a week’s worth of meals each Sunday, and shlepped his kids to Bar and Bat Mitzvahs.

He was often plagued by frustration, rage, despair, sleeplessness, exhaustion, and loneliness. “Sometimes the best you can be is not very good,” Shapiro said in a recent interview.

Shapiro sought support through the years from licensed therapists and his rabbis. Rabbi Debra Nesselson reminded him that “[n]o one has an obligation to sacrifice” one’s own life to save someone else’s. Shapiro has endeavored to carry that message with him as he moves on with his life and in his book, whose release comes almost a year after Susan’s death.

Shapiro will be reading and signing his book at Winnetka’s Book Stall on Thursday, October 14, 6:30 p.m.

Robert Nagler Miller is a journalist and editor who writes frequently about arts- and Jewish-related topics from his home in Chicago.