Minding Our Elders: Caregivers Share Their Personal Stories is a portable support group; a reminder that you aren't alone. Rather than a how-to, Minding Our Elders is a shared space where individual caregivers relate their unique family journey into elder care. These caregivers know your pain in watching a loved one suffer, the joy of giving of oneself, and the emotional and physical exhaustion of the caregiving experience. Some offer wry humor as armor against the agony within. Others offer simple tears. They all offer honesty. Sibling issues? Check. Dementia challenges? Check. Sudden decline? Check. Long, drawn-out suffering? Sadly, we need to check that box, as well. Each short, self-contained story is a vignette that illustrates how people and families are changed by the caregiving experience. Minding Our Elders is an intimate and powerful resource for caregivers who wonder how others are coping. With this book, a support group is always at your fingertips. Minding Our Elders: Caregivers Share Their Personal Stories contains six stories of my own, plus twenty stories obtained through interviews with other boomers struggling to keep up with the needs of their aging loved ones and not go crazy doing it. One woman is in Georgia, caring for a parent in New York. One man is in San Francisco and was caring for his dying father in Florida. The settings for the rest of the interviews are in Fargo, North Dakota, and Moorhead, Minnesota. We comprise a group of men and women who've devoted our love, time, energy, and sometimes our health to taking care of our older adults. If you walked into a support group, you'd see such a diverse set of people. Join us as we share our stories with the hope that they will help you feel less alone.   ~Carol Bradley Bursack Author, columnist, and consultant Carol Bradley Bursack spent over two decades caring for a neighbor and six elderly family members. As a result of this experience, she wrote "Minding Our Elders: Caregivers Share Their Personal Stories," a portable support group for caregivers. Carol's websites Minding Our Elders and Minding Our Elders blog include articles rich with information and comfort as well as resources. Her long-running newspaper column also called "Minding Our Elders," is available weekly in multiple newspapers online and in print.  Her interviews include NPR's Talk of the Nation; Senior Solutions, produced by Detroit Area Agency on Aging; and Wisconsin Public Radio. She's routinely interviewed by newspapers, magazines, and on major websites, including Reader's Digest (Digital), Next Avenue, Salon.com, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The USA Today Network, Chicago-based Make It Better magazine, The Upside of Aging, Booming Encore, US News & World Report, and Market Watch. Besides authoring "Minding Our Elders: Caregivers Share Their Personal Stories," Carol wrote 'Swimming upstream in a media library,' a contribution to "A Handbook for Media Librarians," edited by Katherine Schopflin, Hardcopy published by Facet, 2008 and online, 2018.  In addition to her own book, she's contributed to titles including "Dementia: Frank and Linda's story: New approaches, new understanding, new hope," (Lion-Monarch, March 2010); and was a content editor for "Finding Joy in Alzheimer's: New Hope for Caregivers," (2015), by Marie Marley, Ph.D., and Daniel C. Potts, MD, FAAN. She wrote a foreword for the second edition of "Wishes to Die For: Advance Care Directives that Grant Caregivers Lasting Peace," by Kevin J. Haselhorst, MD (2015), as well as for "Caregiving Both Ways," (2019) by Molly Wisniewski. She is also a contributor to an anthology edited by Marita Golden titled "Us Against Alzheimer's: Stories of Love, Family, and Faith," (2019).