Sasha and the Caregiver’s Journey

Caregiving entered Perry and Sasha’s marriage without an announcement. No ceremony marked the shift from husband and wife to caregiver and patient. A fall was just a fall, until it wasn’t. An appointment led to another appointment. By the time Perry understood how much their lives had changed, love had already become work as well as feeling.

Sasha and the Caregiver’s Journey tells that story from two directions.

Part One is Sasha’s story. Born Alexandra in communist Czechoslovakia, she grew up in a family the state distrusted for its education and its past. At eighteen she crossed a guarded border by train, uncertain until the last kilometre whether she’d make it out. She worked as a laundress in a Copenhagen psychiatric hospital, rationed coins for heat in a cold Sussex flat, and eventually landed in Los Angeles, where she finished a two-year college program in one year and went on to study psychology at UCLA. Her marriage to Perry began, famously, with a stranger holding out an apple and asking if she liked them. She did. Only green ones. Their life together ran fifty-three years, through distances that separated them and an unexpected closeness that returned near the end, when words started to disappear and presence became the only language left.

Part Two is the practical guide Perry wished existed when Sasha’s care began. Love can make you willing to lift, wash, dress, feed, and advocate for someone. It doesn’t teach you how to do any of that safely. Perry walks through what he learned the hard way: recognizing pressure injuries before they become emergencies, transfers and equipment that protect both bodies, wheelchair fit, toileting and dignity, feeding and nutrition, scheduling care that never clocks out, finding respite before burnout finds you, and the medical and emotional groundwork that makes a crisis survivable instead of catastrophic. The final chapters cover palliative and end-of-life care directly, including what to watch for, how to prepare family, and what it means to shift from fixing to simply staying present.

This isn’t a sanitized account. Perry writes plainly about the moments he got it wrong, the fatigue, the frustration, and the guilt that followed. What holds the book together isn’t perfect caregiving. It’s the argument that skill and humility have to join love before care becomes safe, and that asking for help is not a failure of devotion.

Perry S. Kinkaide holds a PhD in brain and behavioural research from the University of Alberta. He’s worked as a manager with the Government of Alberta, a managing partner at KPMG Management Consulting, and founder of several technology associations. He’s the author of The Commons Series and moderator of the KEI Network. This book sits in his Personal Series, alongside forthcoming titles Whimsy: The Worlds We Create and Falling in Love with Life: One Day at a Time.

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