EP 62 :: Caregiving in Fact and Fiction :: Annette Dashofy

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Annette Dashofy talks with Bobbi and Mike about her multi Agatha Award nominated Zoe Chambers mystery series and caring for her father, as he battled Alzheimer’s, and then her mother, with vascular dementia.

“My mother would try to come up with the word to say, what was on her mind, and then she would just cover her face with her hands and start crying again. It would rip my heart out,” Annette says.

Annette Dashofy is the USA Today best-selling author of the multi Agatha Award nominated Zoe Chambers mystery series about a paramedic and deputy coroner in rural Pennsylvania’s tight-knit Vance Township. Annette also helped care for her father as he battled the ravages of Alzheimer’s. Less than ten years after he passed away, her mother was diagnosed with vascular dementia, placing her once again into the role of caregiver.   

“We really tried for as long as possible to keep her in her home until she started falling,” Anette explains. “She wanted to come back to her house, you know, but that wasn't an option.”

“Bobbi, your book - Confessions of an Imperfect Caregiver - got me through a lot of the rough patches. Just reading it, knowing that it’s OK, it is all right to feel guilty, made me feel better,” Annette says.

“In Zoe Chambers, I wanted to put my character Pete in the position of having to deal with Harry, his dad. And Harry gave me a chance to revisit the nicer memories of my dad. It was not that my dad was not a nice person, but I wanted Harry to be a character who was true to the illness and someone that my readers would want to spend an entire book with,” Anette explains.

You can find Annette on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. And to learn more about her, and her book series, you can visit her website.

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