Suzy McNamara Author of “The Silkworm, the Magician, and the Sister Tree”
All Home Care Matters and our host, Lance A. Slatton, were honored to welcome author Suzy McNamara as a guest to the show.
About Suzy McNamara:
Suzy McNamara is the author of The Silkworm, the Magician, and the Sister Tree, a deeply human exploration of caregiving, grief, faith, loss, and enduring love.
A poet, mother of four, fundraiser, lawyer, Secular Carmelite, and widow, Suzy writes for those navigating loss and the often-invisible weight of caring for someone they love.
In 2024, Suzy lost her husband of 37 years, Bob McNamara, to Posterior Cortical Atrophy, an aggressive form of early-onset Alzheimer’s, after caring for him at home for five years. Just months earlier, her sister and lifelong best friend, Elizabeth Muslin, died from Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis.
These overlapping losses profoundly shaped Suzy’s perspective and inform her writing today.
Her work offers particular insight into the realities of early-onset Alzheimer’s, when illness can begin dismantling identity during years when marriages, careers, friendships, and family life are often at their most active.
Suzy writes honestly about the daily realities of caregiving — the isolation, exhaustion, anticipatory grief, and the quiet work of preserving dignity, countering shame, and holding onto meaning amid uncertainty.
She believes grief can be a lonely sport and that survival often depends on community, shared language, faith, and the courage to name what is too often left unsaid.
Through her writing, Suzy seeks to walk alongside caregivers and those grieving profound loss, reminding them they do not have to carry everything alone.
About The Silkworm, the Magician, and the Sister Tree:
The Silkworm, the Magician, and the Sister Tree is a deeply personal memoir about love, caregiving, grief, faith, and what remains after unimaginable loss.
Within a single year, Suzy lost both her husband of 37 years to early-onset Alzheimer’s and her sister — her lifelong best friend and emotional support system — to lung disease.
With raw honesty and vulnerability, Suzy chronicles the daily realities of caregiving, the isolation and anticipatory grief, and the exhaustion of watching someone you love gradually disappear while they are still physically present.
She also explores the particular ache of losing a sister and refuses to rush either loss toward easy answers, resolution, or meaning.
Instead, the book gives voice to the weight carried by caregivers and the layered grief that can follow while offering something equally important: companionship.
Through love, community, and faith, Suzy offers hope that joy and peace can eventually exist alongside grief.
The Silkworm, the Magician, and the Sister Tree is for anyone who has cared for someone they love, grieved someone they could not save, or simply needed to know they are not alone in what they are carrying.