Name: The Challenges and Gifts of Caregiving for a Loved One Living With Dementia.
Start: 2025-11-20T13:00:00-06:00
Location: Vestavia Hills Library in the Forest

Thursday, November 20, 2025: The Challenges and Gifts of Caregiving for a Loved One Living With Dementia.
Presented by Renée Brown Harmon, MD, and Beverly E. Thorn, Ph.D. Vestavia Library in the Woods, 1221 Montgomery Highway, 1 – 3 pm. Free and open to the public.
About the presentation: Providing care for a loved one living with Alzheimer’s disease or another dementia comes with many emotional, physical, and practical challenges. There are also unexpected gifts along the way. Our presenters will share their personal experiences in caring for their respective husbands, both the challenges and the gifts, and offer hard-won wisdom they have gained on their journeys.
Meet the Presenters
Renée Brown Harmon, MD
After retiring from a thirty-year career as a family medicine physician, Harmon published Surfing the Waves of Alzheimer’s: Principles of Caregiving That Kept Me Upright in 2020, a teaching memoir about her late husband’s time with younger-onset Alzheimer’s disease. Life Hikes: Walking Through Loss to What Comes After, published in November 2025, is an essay collection that explores grief, courage, and the healing power of nature.
Beverly E. Thorn, PhD
In Before I Lose My Own Mind, Thorn – a psychologist, neuroscientist, and end-of-life doula – provides an honest vision of caregiving for her husband that is tender, openhearted, and genuinely useful. Filled with resources and insights on later life planning, advance care directives, clinical trials, support groups, death with dignity, grief, recovery, and more, this book is a road map for all caregivers, whether they’re family or friends, spouses or adult children, professionals or novices.