11:39AM (PST) – Meryl Comer, Emmy award winning broadcast journalist, author of Slow Dancing with a Stranger, and President and CEO of the Geoffrey Beene Foundation Alzheimer’s Initiative In 2001, the woman who are about to meet was faced with an unfathomable truth. The man she...
Read MoreThe symptoms were hardly noticeable at first. In fact, had Meryl Comer not been a veteran TV news reporter, she might have missed the subtle changes in her husband’s behavior. Even then, she chalked up his sudden lack of focus and lightning-quick temper to job...
Read MoreI met Meryl Comer once, briefly, at a conference, and recall the juxtaposition of her sleek beauty and harrowing personal story: her husband, once chief of hematology and oncology at the National Institutes of Health, debilitated by early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, and her mother with the late-onset...
Read MoreMeryl Comer's husband vanished more than a decade ago. Yet she has remained at his side, caring for him night and day as he drifted into the darkness of Alzheimer's disease. The story of how Comer, an Emmy Award-winning former broadcast journalist who lives in Kensington, Md.,...
Read MoreAlzheimer’s disease affects a reported 36 million people worldwide. But Meryl Comer had never heard of it when her husband was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s at age 58. The award-winning journalist gave up her television career to take care of him at home -- for...
Read MoreWashington, DC - Slow Dancing With a Stranger: Lost and Found in the Age of Alzheimer's (release date on September 2nd by HarperOne) is a poignant and deeply personal account of Meryl Comer's daily realities and overwhelming responsibilities as a full-time caretaker for her husband,...
Read MoreThere are any number of good "dementia memoirs" at this point. Slow Dancing with a Stranger is a sometimes poignant often startling addition to the collection. What sets it apart is its ambition to engage readers in a vitally necessary policy discussion over what is...
Read MoreWhat is it like to care for a person with dementia? For most people, it can be hard to imagine the daily struggle, the exhaustion, the emotional pain. And in truth, recent portrayals of Alzheimer's in books, newsprint, and advocacy pleas have shied away from...
Read MoreGeoffrey Beene Foundation Alzheimer's Initiative CEO Comer offers an unvarnished account of her experience as her husband's caretaker after he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. The author has testified before Congress, and she is a founding member of USAgainstAlzheimer's, a co-founder of Women Against Alzheimer's Network and...
Read MoreMeryl Comer sat on stage at the BIO International Convention in San Diego last month between two prominent scientists: Francis S. Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, and Jan M. Lundberg, head of R&D at Eli Lilly & Co. The three were on...
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