The Promise I Kept: My Journey With Dad from Home Care Through Hospice

The Promise I Kept is a poignant, funny, and often heartbreaking story of a daughter's journey to live up to a vow that she never put her father, Jack, into a nursing home, his greatest fear for his final days. Thirteen years later, now a single mother, the marker would be called in after her mother's passing. For the next nine years, Jackie Madden Haugh would watch over her father's care, first in his home with live-in help and finally with her. Totally unprepared for her new role, Jackie thought it would be an easy job. After all, her kids saw her as Super Mom ready to take on all of life's messes. But she quickly found her world filled with adult diapers, a pharmacy of pills, and days heavily laced in utter boredom. Cut off from friends, her children, and work, she began to crumble. As the days melted together, Jackie came to understand the rocky road they traveled was not about what she was doing for him, but what her father was teaching her that would change the trajectory of how she'd continue to live her life: in constant gratitude and with a heart filled with enormous love.