Nancy Taylor Robson – författare

Passion, heartbreak, scandal and triumph. Abigail Adams endured it all. Their love affair was as modern as any today. They married in 1764 against both their mothers'' wishes. Passionate, independent and determined, Abigail bore John six children and struggled to raise, educate and launch them while he struggled to launch a career and a new nation. An uncommon partnership in any time. During the months and years apart, Abigail suffered the fears of any woman not only for her lover''s safety but his fidelity, then drank in the passion of his homecomings. On her own with small children during the Revolution, she scraped together enough to pay the taxes only to have Congress renounce the currency, forcing her to start all over again from nothing. Though she was John''s advisor and trusted partner -- she single-handedly ran the family farm, bought and sold land, invested the meager profits and bartered for their sons'' school fees while he was away -- he ignored her when she demanded the right of women to vote. Proud of her lineage, she was faced with her family''s shame. Worse, she was forced to watch helplessly as two of her children ended their lives in squalor on the eve of her ''Dearest Friend,'' John''s, greatest triumph. John and Abigail''s lives and times -- like ours -- were tumultuous, demanding and uncertain. Abigail''s concerns, particularly, are as modern as those of any woman today - retaining her own identity while sacrificing for her family, maintaining a loving, faithful marriage despite temptations to shatter it, raising children in the face of dangers and pitfalls, and finding the money to make it all work. A Love Like No Other is a timeless story of struggle, ambition, heartbreak and triumph, but most of all it''s the story of an enduring love against all odds.

What matters most when someone close to you has been diagnosed as terminal? Time and quality of life for both of you. Coping with both the practical and emotional questions of this challenging passage. Every death is individual -- as is the walk toward that death both for the one leaving and the ones they leave behind. What truly matters between human beings while taking care of the business of living at the end of life is what this book is about.It offers: •Practical tips for coping with the physical changes that will impact both the person and the caregiver emotionally, physically, financially and spiritually. •Advice on paperwork to make things a little easier for the caregiver and for those they leave behind. •The stories of others; we are not alone •Tips for friends, neighbors, colleagues or any other part of the relationships we all share in life. There is no perfect way to walk through this time in life. But there are good ways to do it. Focusing on what matters while taking care of the practical business of living and dying can make this walk slightly less scary and more rewarding for everyone. How to use this book: Browse the chapter headings; skip around in the TIPS for ways to approach or solve specific problems. Search the Sources at the end of the chapters for additional information. Read the stories of others'' experiences. For the co-worker, the friend and the neighbor, this book offers advice and helpful hints on what to say or do as well as what not to say or do. For the loved one, spouse, and relative it''s a practical guide to what you might expect at each stage and offers realistic and reasonable coping strategies. It includes examples born of the experience of a range of people -- professionals in the field as well as no-professionals like yourself -- of what you might experience on this difficult journey.Yet, as we''ve said, each death is individual just as are the relationships, personalities and personal dynamics involved in each death. Despite the individuality of experience, there are also issues and threads that are universal in human life. This book can act as a practical guide, an encouraging friend, and support, and offers hope for the best possible experience as you help to walk someone home. Across America, 43.5 million people, (nearly one in five adults) care for a loved one 50 or older according to AARP.The Writers:Sue Collins has been a nurse for 38 years and a hospice nurse for 28 years. She has the extensive experience of the professional caregiver and has seen virtually everything at the end of life. As much as anything this book arises out of the OMG!I-can''t-believe-they-said-that/did-that moments as well as the anger, frustration, grace and poignancy she has witnessed during the last days of patients for whom she has cared.Nancy Taylor Robson, author of three other books, lost her father to bone cancer, which took approximately three years from diagnosis to departure, and her mother-in-law to a long decline and a series of strokes. She has sat by deathbeds and seen more than one friend through the last months, weeks, days and hours of life and knows that as painful a journey as this is, there can be gifts and blessings along the way. She knows, (at least intellectually), that none of us is getting out of here alive.

Every death is individual.What truly matters between human beings at this time? It offers: tips for coping with the physical challenges; advice on paperwork and practicalities; stories; humor. Browse the chapter headings. Skip around in TIPS. Search the Sources lists. Read the stories.

  This book is a guide, an encouraging friend and support, and offers hope for the best possible experience as you help to walk someone ''home.''

Across America, 43.5 million people, Nearly one in five adults cares for a loved one 50 or older according to AARP.

Nancy Taylor Robson is one of the first women in the country to earn a US Coast Guard license. She grew up sailing and building boats with her father and worked as a housepainter, desk clerk and yacht maintenance person while in college, but never imagined working on an old WWII 85-foot DPC (Defense Plant Corporation) tugboat, slogging up and down the Atlantic coast and in the Gulf of Mexico for a living. Then she met a man, whose ambition at the time was to own a run a coastal tugboat. 

She earned a degree in history from University of Maryland, but instead of going to law school she married that man, a sailor and graduate of the US Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point, who two weeks earlier had become captain on that tug. 

A month later, she joined him on a short run on the upper Chesapeake Bay. Although she had been aboard tugs before, this was different, "like the first taste of a drug -- intoxicating, seemingly harmless, but the beginning of a slowly growing addiction." The book initiates the reader into the beauty and romance of life on the water combined with the exhausting, dangerous work. Robson relishes the incredible closeness to Nature: whales, porpoise so close she could nearly touch them and birds that come into the galley to watch her making bread, as well as the magnificent spectacle of a sunset on a clear winter''s day as it glows behind a black network of bare-branched trees along the shore. She also endures the fear of being maimed or lost overboard, the male opposition, and the drudgery, collapsing more than once in icy, sodden clothes into an unmade bunk. On seagoing trips that ranged from the Chesapeake Bay to Cape Cod, from Maine to Florida, to Bermuda, New Orleans and Mexico, she felt the frustrations of failure but also the exhilaration of success and an appreciation for hard won accomplishment.. It''s a world that many imagine what it would be like to share in all its adventurous, terrifying glory though few actually experience. Robson, one of a handful of women who paved the way for every intrepid woman who has followed, brings that world alive and takes you along for every hard-won but glorious nautical mile. This book is for anyone who every imagined running away to sea, for every woman who wonders what it would be like to live a real-life adventure romance, for every man who relishes the outdoors, and for everyone who loves a good yarn.

Seventeen-year-old Bailey Kraft, descended from a long line of Chesapeake waterman -- river royalty -- knows where he is going. He will "follow the water like his father, grandfather, and generations of men before him. The work is backbreaking and often dangerous yet framed by the breathtaking beauty of the Chesapeake; it is a bred-in-the-bone life. But it is also a dying livelihood. Fish stocks are plummeting and with them, the harvests. Watermen, unable to earn a living, are being forced to give up their time-honored way of life. Yet Bailey is a Kraft---river royalty---with the Kraft gift for finding fish coded into his genes. He has a sense of purpose and belonging, until the day his father shatters his lifelong plans. Suddenly, he must fight the people he loves most, including his best friend, to hang on to his birthright. Set on the Chesapeake Bay''s Eastern Shore, Course of the Waterman is the coming-of-age story of Bailey Kraft; his tough and determined little sister, Hannah; his best friend, Booty; and Booty''s bitter, alcoholic father, Tud. Bailey faces fear, loss, and wrenching changes; yet amidst it all, he glimpses the unexpected possibilities that life can offer.

Like the Kraft men before him, Bailey has river water in his veins, and a peculiar talent for finding fish: 

the Krafts are river royalty. But every year the haul is less 

impressive, and supporting a family by fishing is becoming increasingly difficult. Early in the book Bailey''s father Orrin announces that he wants his son to go to college, to have options that he didn''t have. This change in plan is wholly unwelcome: Bailey had expected to fish full-time after finishing high school; he would have quit school to do so had he been allowed. But responding to his father''s bombshell is only the first of a great many challenges Bailey must meet in the course of the story--hard work in difficult, sometimes life threatening circumstances not least among them. 

Bailey is surrounded by a handful of characters who are as vividly imagined as he is: his parents and younger sister and the Warrens, Tud and his son Booty, the latter more brother to Bailey than friend. R_obson, indeed, has fleshed out her characters and explored their interlocking relationships--all of which are changed during the course of this story--more fully than most authors can in twice as many pages. Robson''s book explores the obligations of friendship and the bonds, stronger than rivalries and animosities, that hold together a community of people who need one another to survive--"the pull and haul of relationship, gift, and obligation." 

Like her characters, Robson grew up on the Chesapeake, and she worked for years as a deckhand on a coastal tug. (She tells her story in Woman in the Wheelhouse.) She couldn''t have written this book the way she did without that experience. Readers like myself who aren''t familiar with the life she describes--most of us, surely--will encounter some unfamiliar vocabulary here, but context is sufficient to get the meaning across. The first paragraph immerses the reader at once in the life of a Chesapeake waterman: 

"The trotline groaned over the roller as it came up out of the blue-black Elizabeth River on Maryland''s Eastern Shore. Braced against the boat''s wooden coaming, seventeen-year-old Bailey Kraft was poised, dip net ready, scanning for the bait twisted every eight feet or so into the mile-ong line. That was where the crab would be--if there were a crab. As he watched, a shadow rose from the dark water and came into focus, sharpening into olive shell and blue-green claws that clung to a frayed gray eel chunk tied to the line. When the crab broke the surface, Bailey leaned out, scooped it up, and dumped it into the bushel basket at his feet."