Getting It All Down

Bursack’s writing is intensely personal and profound. She writes about the people she cared for and situations she encountered. One of the most amazing subjects she wrote about was “boot camp” training for nursing home staff, which teaches them the hard way how to understand people with dementia. Bursack had heard about it and asked if she could go through the training.

“Getting inside the head of a person with dementia was incredibly powerful,” she said. “It’s a new thought, but why is it new?”

She wrote about the experience, and after that “I heard from nursing home administrators all over the country, that this is incredible and we need to put this into our curriculum.” When she talks to people about the experience, she says people are “just glued” to her words. 

She hopes to eventually put together stories like this one into a book of essays. Maybe some of the stories will be about how her own life has evolved since 2005 and how she is perceived by others.

“My years of hands-on eldercare are for now done,” she said. “But everybody over 55 wants to be my best friend. I must have an aura. They can smell it on me. . . . My true calling is to help the masses online through my experience—my writing, column, book—to break the isolation and know they’re not alone. . . . I have to work to keep my hands off, but I guide people to the right source. . . . It consumes my life in a different manner now.”