Jamieson Haverkampf is the author of Mom Minus Dad: The Essential Resource Guide for Busy Adults with a Newly Widowed Parent (Blooming Women Press, L.L.C., $14.95, Publication Date May 9, 2008). Mom Minus Dad provides more than 500 useful resources and practical advice to assist other adult sons and daughters brainstorm ideas and find assistance in ten common caregiving areas after the loss of a parent.
Ms. Haverkampf knows the frustrations, struggles and successes of caregiving for ill, aging, and dying parents first hand. In her early thirties, Ms. Haverkampf and her sister supported and advised their 61-year-old father with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma through eleven months of chemotherapy, radiation, a stem cell transplant and a clinical trial at M.D. Anderson Cancer Hospital. After their father’s death in 2001, Ms. Haverkampf and her sister shifted gears to assist their fifty-six-year-old mother through the heart-wrenching and decision-loaded journey of unexpected widowhood.
Along her caregiving journey, Ms. Haverkampf hunted for books with resources and advice to help her navigate her new role as a “surrogate spouse” of a newly widowed parent. Additionally, Ms. Haverkampf needed tools to balance her own life with changing family dynamics and new responsibilities. She found many books about bereavement, grief, and loss written to counsel widows or widowers, but most of these books didn’t address the modern needs of busy adult sons and daughters of these widows or widowers who end up guiding—and in some cases making— many decisions for their widowed parent. Ms. Haverkampf’s quest for a resource guide to assist adults with a newly widowed parent ended in 2004 when she realized the book she so urgently needed didn’t exist.
As she gathered her own helpful resources, advice, and strategies to use with her widowed mother, Ms. Haverkampf wanted to help the more than twelve million people who lose a parent every year with this information she accumulated. Mom Minus Dad: The Essential Resource Guide for Busy Adults with a Newly Widowed Parent is a compilation of her best hands-on tips, resources, and advice for other adult sons and daughters struggling to balance life while assisting a newly widowed parent.
Along her journey of loss and healing, Ms. Haverkampf became certified as a Grief Recovery Specialist through the Grief Recovery Institute in Sherman Oaks, California. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with her two-year-old Cavalier dog, Fritz.