The Melba Notebooks

Bob and Melba marry at the dawn of the Great Depression. A mining engineer, Bob finds work outside the US and is later blacklisted by mining companies after supporting a gold miners' strike in the Philippines. For several years thereafter he can only find work as an underground miner himself. Melba, Bob and their children make a life, often from scratch, in mining towns around the world, including Quebec, Ontario, the Philippines, Mexico, and the Western USA.

Bob and Melba grow old and frail. Having lived on their own terms, they want to die on their own terms too-at home, away from institutional protocols that tend to sanitize, trivialize, and prolong old age and death. That isn't easy; but they do so with the help of their children and caregivers. This is the story of how Bob and Melba live at home into their tenth decade of life, fade, fail, and die. It was culled from five spiral bound notebooks written by those who loved and cared for them. It's a five-year conversation among those caregivers about Elder care and terminal care told with clarity, sympathy, humor, and power.

The Melba Notebooks were edited and redacted by Bob and Melba's son, a physician with fifty years of experience in primary care. They are punctuated by his recollections, anecdotes, and frank medical commentary.

Whoever has experienced an end of life situation-or expects to do so one day-will appreciate this informative and moving story; due to aging populations in many developed nations, the topic will likely be with us for some time.