As a caregiver full of despair and loneliness, Rose Lamatt enters a chat room on the Internet for the first time. She finds a different world than the one she's used to. Night after night, she signs into the same chat room, meeting people who listen to her, people who are passionate, loving, and at times just as depressed as she is. At times she lives her life through these online friends. They save her from the everyday trials of caregiving. They are there each night keeping her connected to someone, something, not feeling alone and empty. For more than ten years, Rose shares a friendship...

Today is the first day I've had the desire to write. I've thought about it for months, even years, but this is the first time I feel the need. I want to write of the struggle she's going through with this horrific disease; the everyday living. I want to write how the caregiver loses herself along with the victim. Victim--first time I've used that word. But there is no other word that best describes it. Carol is a victim of time. I've lost any thought that she'll get better. I've come to the conclusion I'm living alone, even though she's with me in body. She doesn't talk to me in...

I blend into the walls, like other women: faceless, no expression-a dead look. I've lost my identity, my individuality. I no longer know myself. The other women are young, Black, Hispanic, few White, like me. Most have been abused by fathers, mothers, husbands or children. Children who don't want to care for mothers sign them in after they have been released from psychiatric facilities. Twenty-year olds are put here by mothers or fathers after they come from drug or alcohol centers. Children don't want to care for mothers, and mothers don't want to care for children-their own flesh and blood....