"Who will name the bees?" with Sarah Vosburgh

A mom with Alzheimer’s looks at her daughter and asks a question that’s tender, impossible, and weirdly practical: “How will you name them all?” That one line becomes the heart of our conversation with psychologist and author Sarah Vosburgh, whose memoir *Who Will Name the Bees?* traces the months from moving her mother into memory care to the day she died, while also reaching back into childhood and earlier adulthood to show what their relationship was before dementia rewrote it. 

We talk about what Alzheimer’s disease can look like in real life, not just in brochures: slipping judgment, sticky notes everywhere, conversations that reset, and those startling moments when clarity returns for a beat. Sarah also shares the pressures that so many family caregivers and sandwich generation parents know well, juggling a full-time career, teenage daughters, and the daily emotional math of visiting, advocating, and trying not to agitate someone whose brain is “a mess” even when their face looks familiar. Along the way we touch on how trauma and illness can accelerate decline, including cancer treatment, chemo brain, and a house fire that forced others to step in. 

Sarah explains why her memoir weaves poetry between scenes, and how writing began years later through insomnia, midnight notes, and a memoir class that built the book five pages at a time. The biggest takeaway is permission: you make the best decisions you can with the information you have, and you can’t survive caregiving without learning self-forgiveness. If this conversation helps, share it with someone walking through dementia caregiving, subscribe for more stories like this, and leave a review so more listeners can find the support.

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Welcome And Guest Introduction

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Well, hello, and welcome to the Healthy Living Podcast. I'm your host, Joe Grombine, and today we've got a very special guest. Her name is Sarah Vosberg, and she is the author of the book titled Who Will Name the Bees? And uh she's a psychologist, an author, and a caregiver. And really, I think that's enough of an introduction. Welcome, Sarah. How are you doing today?

SPEAKER_00 0:26

I'm doing great. Thank you very much for having me.

SPEAKER_01 0:29

Well, it's a pleasure. I don't often do interviews on Sundays, but it's uh a welcome break from working in the farm. So I'm really curious about this book. Who will name the bees? Why don't you tell us a little bit about

The Story Behind Naming Bees

SPEAKER_01 0:45

it? What's what's the title about, and and and tell us a little bit about your book?

SPEAKER_00 0:52

What's the title about is a question I think pretty much everyone asks me. That is answered very in a very detailed fashion in the book. But the short version is at one point my mother and I were discussing the fact that my husband and I were doing beekeeping. We had started beekeeping, and we were very excited about it. We had gardens, flowers, vegetables, herbs, all of that stuff. And we knew that it was gonna help with all of that, but that it was also gonna help the bees. And I didn't even know that my mom remembered it. She was pretty, pretty disconnected at that point in time. And I was talking to her about flowers, which was always a safe subject to discuss with my mom.

SPEAKER_01 1:42

And we were we were talking about for a second. Let's go back and talk about your mom for a second because our audience doesn't know anything about her. Why don't you bring us a little bit into that?

SPEAKER_00 1:55

My mom had Alzheimer's, it was frustrating for both of us. She didn't want to have

Alzheimer’s And The Move To Memory Care

SPEAKER_00 2:06

it in the early stages. She knew what was happening, and she did everything that she could to cover and finally reached a point where she couldn't, and also where she couldn't care for herself, and her husband wasn't interested in caring for her, so she was placed in a memory care facility.

SPEAKER_01 2:24

How old was she when this was all happening?

SPEAKER_00 2:28

Well, I would say onset was somewhere in her mid-60s, probably 64, 65. Um that's young within reason, and she died when she was 75.

SPEAKER_01 2:38

Oh, oh wow, okay. And how long ago was that? 2008. Got it. Okay, I just wanted to get a little spot on the map. Okay, so back to the bees.

SPEAKER_00 2:50

So back to the bees. So we were talking about flowers, and uh again, always a safe subject between my mom and me. And we had gotten through an entire conversation about them, and we were sort of sitting in companionable silence for a few minutes, which I learned to let happen because sometimes she just wanted company. And then she turned to me and said, Tell me this was springtime, and she said, Tell me about your flowers. What are you growing? You know, what are you doing with them this summer? And so I started telling her all the things that I had already told her with a fair amount of frustration, internal frustration, because I was going to be repeating what I had already said. But my husband blew me, he was with me and blew me a kiss and you know, kind of settled me down and and got me going. So I started the same stuff all over again. There, no point in changing it. And she turned to me, and this was this was not two weeks before she died. Oh wow. She turned to me and she said, You already told me that. What about the bees? And I and I didn't even know that she remembered. I had told her over winter that we were going to be doing the beekeeping, and so I told her about the bees and that you know, we were gonna have two nukes worth of bees, and so that meant two two queens and two, you know, basically two hives. And she she stopped me for a second and said, But Sarah, how will you name them all? Um and I said, Well, I don't know, Ma, you're gonna have to help me. And she said, Well, that's gonna be difficult, that'll be a very big job. I guess I will.

SPEAKER_01 4:47

So that's how it ended up.

SPEAKER_00 4:50

Who will name the bees?

SPEAKER_01 4:51

Beautiful story to the name there. I like that. So this book is a is a memoir. It is. And where does it begin?

SPEAKER_00 5:04

It

A Memoir Built With Poems

SPEAKER_00 5:05

begins. Good question. It it begins, the vessel for the book is the time from the time that I took my mom to memory care until the day that she died, which was eight, nine months, October to June.

SPEAKER_01 5:25

So it's really the story of your mom and your relationship during her Alzheimer's experience.

SPEAKER_00 5:33

I refer to it as her incarceration.

SPEAKER_01 5:35

Okay, fair enough.

SPEAKER_00 5:37

It is it is very, I mean, there's so much that she didn't have that she had prior to that. And I toggle back and forth in each of the chapters. The beginning of each chapter is something that's happening in memory care.

SPEAKER_01 5:54

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 5:54

The second half of each chapter is something that happened in our earlier life, my childhood potentially, or early adulthood, that would have happened, that did happen in at the same time period, at the same in the same season, in the same month, that kind of a thing. And in between is a poem that's related to both.

SPEAKER_01 6:21

Okay. So that's so so you're a poet on top of it all.

SPEAKER_00 6:25

I am probably more a poet than a prose writer.

SPEAKER_01 6:30

Okay, all right. Well, I'm I'm curious to to learn more about all of this. And so at the beginning of this book, or where the book begins, how old are you?

SPEAKER_00 6:44

50, 40. She died when I was 51, so 50, 49.

SPEAKER_01 6:50

All right. So that's uh kind of a, in my opinion, sort of a midpoint in life. Your memoir or your your bio says you're a psychologist. Where are you are you still or were you active in your practice at the time?

SPEAKER_00 7:06

I was. I was very busy, and I was sandwiched between my mother and my teenage daughters, early teenage daughters, just coming out of their tweens. So it was a pretty busy time pre-driving for both of them. So I was doing a lot of taxi driving and and all of that, and needing to find time to visit my mom and so on, working full-time. And I'm now retired, but I'm consulting.

SPEAKER_01 7:36

Okay. And physically on the map, where are you at this point?

SPEAKER_00 7:40

I'm in San Diego, California.

SPEAKER_01 7:42

Oh, okay. So we're neighbors. I'm I'm just a little north of you. So you're in San Diego, you've got a psychology practice, you got teenage daughters, your mom is in this memory care facility. It seems like a very, very busy point in your life. How do you go and say, I know, I'll add one more thing to it, start writing about

Writing After Loss One Page At Time

SPEAKER_01 8:09

it.

SPEAKER_00 8:10

I did not start writing about it when it was happening.

SPEAKER_01 8:14

Oh, okay, got it.

SPEAKER_00 8:16

And and it, I never intended to start writing about it. It was never, ever, ever my intent to write about it. But after she died, you know, a lot of the time when all of this was happening and you talk about the busyness of it, it was crazy busy. And I felt like I was putting one foot in front of the other. I was making the best decisions I could with the information that I had at the time. I look back on some of those decisions and I would do them differently, just like I would as a parent. It's an amateur business taking your parents' autonomy away or being a parent to your parent, just like being a parent is an amateur business. And you do the best you can with the information that you have and and you go with it. And I at that time, busy, busy, busy as I was, I was putting one foot in front of the other and not really. Yes, I was thinking about the consequences, but I wasn't thinking about the larger ramifications of a lot of what was happening for us personally. Like my children really struggled after my mother died, and obviously I did too, but even then I was still putting one foot in front of the other. So while I wouldn't say I was in denial or oblivious, I just wasn't focused on what was happening or what had happened. And then we I we were in New England at the time. I moved to San Diego. And when we were in San Diego, I started waking up in the middle of the night being unable to sleep and having stories about my mom sort of ricochet around in my head. And I would think about them. I'd wake up and I'd think about them and I'd be awake about them until morning light. I it I just couldn't, I couldn't get rid of them, and I would complain to my husband, you know, these these, you know, I I thought last night about this and such that happened with my mom, and I kept going over it and over it and over it in my head. And he said, Well, why don't you write it down and maybe it'll help you go to sleep? Well, it it did and it didn't. You know, the pad next to the bed requires the light and so forth. And that means waking him up and waking me up, you know, my my eyes, and you know, adjusting and and then trying to be coherent. And he he got he knew I was frustrated about that too. And I came home one day and he was measuring my night table. And I said, What are you doing? Are you getting new furniture? He said, No, I'm measuring this for glass. And I said, Why? And he said, Because I'm gonna give you a Sharpie, and when you wake in the middle of the night, you can jot stuff down with the Sharpie, and you don't have to turn on the lights, and it's not like writing on paper. And in the morning, you can take a picture of it with your phone and we'll wipe it off with alcohol and it's done, and you put it down, and that's what I did, and then I started expanding on those ideas and stories, and then I got connected with San Diego Writers Inc, which is an amazing place, met all kinds of authors doing all kinds of things, ran into authors who were doing memoir, realized what I was writing about was memoir, and went to the memoir writing class where we had assignments every week for five pages. And I am fond of saying that because of International Memoir Writers Association, I wrote my book five pages at a time and didn't really realize I was writing a book until it was I sat one day on my living room floor. I had kept putting the five pages every week after class. I would put them on the corner of my desk and I had a pile, and I thought, well, I should organize these. And I ended up organizing them chronologically and realized that I had quite the volume of information, and that's when I had the idea to add the stories about my mother before she was in memory care, and stories about my childhood with her. And I ended up with quite the volume of info, and that's where it went.

SPEAKER_01 13:07

Wow, so it wasn't um it was kind of a circuitous route. You you you had sort of the ingredients sort of fall out of the cupboard into your lap, and then you came to a place where you learned how to put it together, and you realized you had quite you know quite a recipe, and you were able to put it together. I know that you mentioned a couple of times how you were doing the best you can. And I know that as a father, a grandfather, a business owner, all of these things,

How Alzheimer’s Changed Day To Day

SPEAKER_01 13:41

you know, there's books that tell you about how to do things, but everybody's experience is very individual and very personal. I've known a few people who went through an Alzheimer's experience with a loved one, whether it was a a mom or a spouse or somebody close. And it seems that those experiences are dramatically different as well. It's not like there's one book that says, here's how it's gonna go. There's certainly stages and characteristics that you would say, well, that's definitely this is happening, but there's not like it's gonna be like this. With your mom, did it happen in like in some people I've known it happened sort of in fits and starts, where sometimes they were completely lucid, normal, everything's great, and the next day you walk in the room and they don't recognize you, or or they don't remember a thing that we just talked about, or whatever. How was it like with your mom with that respect?

SPEAKER_00 14:43

It was a very long circuitous route, and what you talk about the some days there, some days not. You know, early on, it they talk about judgment being the first thing to go, it's the last thing that we gain as humans, and it's the first thing to go when something is gonna go.

SPEAKER_01 15:01

Right.

SPEAKER_00 15:02

It's all right here and this part of your head. And I I look back and I realized that there were questionable judgment kinds of things that she did. And she would have been able to defend them had you asked her about them, and she would have sounded perfectly cognizant and appropriate in doing that. But then, you know, it was the memory lapses about things that she should have remembered, or God, I do this now, but but I've always done it. The notes all over the place, the sticky notes everywhere to remind her to do things. The calendar on the wall that she didn't reference because she didn't remember, she called it the grid thing on the wall. That she didn't that she didn't reference because she forgot what it was for, but she knew there was a grid thing on the wall, and it just she went through periods like that, and then I talked to her on the phone or I'd stop to see her or whatever, and she was my mom. Like there was nothing missing, and I that is apparently a very typical experience, so there's that, and it went like that, and and also there's a fair amount of information out there that suggests that trauma sort of hustles this along, and my mother had two experiences of trauma during those 10 years. One was that she had a recurrence of breast cancer, which really took a lot out of her, and then there's the chemo brain, so I don't know how much chemo contributed to what was going on there, and then she had a house fire.

SPEAKER_01 16:48

What I said I completely understand that I just went through chemo myself not that long ago.

SPEAKER_00 16:55

I'm sorry, I'm I'm it sounds like you were successful because you're looking good, completely successful, and yeah, that's a whole nother story, but uh yeah, and then after that, she had a house fire and lost everything or just short of everything. I mean, she had some little bits and pieces of things that were salvageable, but not much. Oh boy, and that she couldn't, she was unable to negotiate the insurance stuff with her. My husband had to step in there and help her understand what insurance was going to cover and what it wasn't gonna cover, and and all of those kinds of things, and then she would turn around the next day and he would have to explain the same things all over. So I would say between the time just before she had cancer until the time that and then the fire and the time that she died was the most downward trajectory that we saw. And my mother was second generation Alzheimer's. My grandmother took the same route. Oh boy, and I was older when it happened because she was an older grandmother, my mother was an older mother, and my grandmother was an older grandmother. So I was very aware of what was happening and how it happened, and I recognized things as they were going along. Um, so yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:19

Now, as a psychologist, you you deal a lot with people and relationships and trauma and all of those things. So you're you spend you know your career talking to other people about their experiences. How was your relationship with your mom before all of this?

Family Dynamics Faith And Poetry

SPEAKER_00 18:40

I'm a school psychologist, so I j dealt with children and families and all of what you you mentioned there, so there's that and my relationship with the money.

SPEAKER_01 18:54

No, there was such a thing as a school psychologist, so I indeed. Indeed. Oh, good. I'm glad it seems like that's a very needed tool out there.

SPEAKER_00 19:04

Very rewarding, rewarding career. I I had a very rewarding career. So I forgot where I was going. Your relationship with your mom. Oh, my relationship with my mom. So my early years were probably pretty pretty solid with my mom. I think I was a pretty miserable tween. She embarrassed, right? Right. She embarrassed me. I didn't like having her around my friends. I didn't like the way she I thought she was condescending around children and kids my age. And we fought a lot or lived in silence because she didn't want to fight. And that lasted well into my twenties, and then we sort of hit this. I wouldn't say everything was wonderful, but we sort of hit this middle ground kind of where, like I mentioned before, there were safe topics, and two of the most safe topics with my mother were gardening and music. And so my mother and I talked about gardening and music, gardening together, or talked about you know, doing that kind of thing together. If we went out to lunch or whatever, we would talk about gardening or we would talk about music, and we both sang in our church choir together. So that was also a common ground that didn't end up being fiery for any particular reason.

SPEAKER_01 20:53

So you also shared a faith, so that there was something there. Sort of all right, okay. Well, we don't have to get into that.

SPEAKER_00 21:02

I talk in the book, I talk in the book about how my my grandmother had a faith that I truly envy. Okay. She was truly a faithful woman. My mother fought that her entire life. Um she was sent to religious schools, and she was less than religious, and I have been challenged by the notion my whole life.

SPEAKER_01 21:28

Okay. All right. Well, everybody's got their that that takes up a place in most people's life in some way, and and there's no, there's again, there's everybody's got a unique experience. So I I suppose there's probably a lot to talk about there, but we don't have enough time or energy to get into that. I'd like to hear about your poetry and how that fits into all of this.

SPEAKER_00 21:54

So I think about the prose in the book as being booked. Black and white, like black and white photo bookends, black and white photo album bookends, if you will, and the poetry in between, I feel like so much more, and there are plenty of people who would argue with me, but I feel like for me, so much more can be said in poetry with so much more color than can be than I can deliver in prose. And the poems came right along with the prose as I was writing it.

SPEAKER_01 22:40

They just sort of you were writing both of those at the same time.

SPEAKER_00 22:45

Yes, but the poems I I didn't work, I worked hard on the prose. The poems just came.

SPEAKER_01 22:55

Okay, fair enough. I I think you're right. I think uh it takes a very talented, special person with that type of talent to be able to use just prose to really put the emotion and the color and the texture and the depth into a story, whereas song and music and and poetry can often do it with a lot fewer words.

SPEAKER_00 23:21

Indeed.

SPEAKER_01 23:23

So that's good. I well, at least you got a a good talent with the poetry. I'm curious to uh to to read the book and see what your prose is all about. As you're going through this, I I gotta imagine that you get it's like when you get hit with something dramatic like this, like something's changed. It's never gonna be the same. Like when I got diagnosed with cancer, I got hit with this, you know, wall of bricks that says, okay, your life's now different. You got some changing to do, and and it and it was a a big thing. This seems like it could be that sort of a thing for you with your relationship to your mom. Did you like go, oh wow, I've got to do something about this and

Caregiving Guilt And Self Forgiveness

SPEAKER_01 24:10

fix it, or did you go, well, I gotta deal with it? Or I mean, how how did you deal with your relationship with regards to all of a sudden now you know you've got this problem to solve or to deal with, I guess?

SPEAKER_00 24:24

Well, I had the complication. First of all, I as I referred to before, I put one foot in front of the other and made the best decisions that I could at the time, sticking to things that I knew would not agitate her, because there was no point in agitating her when her she was internally a mess, intercranially a mess. So I I did my very best not to agitate her and to try and support her, and so on. But I had the added complication of her being married to her being married, not to my dad. This was someone that she married in her 60s, and he was just not interested. He was sad about what was happening to her, but got very frustrated with her, very angry with her, did not understand what was happening to her, despite my efforts to explain, and really refused to do the kind of caregiving that was necessary, which is why she ended up in memory care. Now, would she have men ended up in memory care anyway? Yes, probably that is not that is not blame, not placing blame because at some point it would have become too much. But early on, I feel he could have been more supportive of her situation. That's how I feel. That doesn't mean that he could have been that he had the skills to do it or any of those kinds of things.

SPEAKER_01 26:15

Now, uh your book, how long ago was it released? April 22nd. Oh, just this year, just recently. Yes. Oh, interesting. Okay. So with the book, I I know you wrote it as you felt a calling, or you're you you you were you were motivated in some way to get this book out there. Looking at it now, uh, do you feel that it's something that other people going through a similar situation, which there are many of, can find some value in in coping or learning or understanding their situation?

SPEAKER_00 26:53

When I first started talking to the editors at Memoir Writers Association, they were the ones that brought it up. I had no intention of publishing. And then after talking a lot about it, I I came to the realization that it could potentially be supportive of others who were going through something similar, whether it was Alzheimer's or illness or whatever. And I wanted to give people permission to do the best they can with the information they have at the time and know that it's whatever you do, it's not going to be perfect. And there are going to be other decisions you might have, could have, should have made in hindsight, but that you can't beat yourself up about it. And I I'm hoping that that rings true in the book for those who read it, that they feel supported by it, and so on, that they they get that message in there that doing the best you can is sometimes just the best you can do.

SPEAKER_01 28:14

Nice. Well, I know it's just only been a short while since the book's been published. And it's funny, books are are kind of a strange thing nowadays with audio books and podcasts, and you know, the the written word isn't as prevalent as it once was. And yet I interview authors almost, you know, multiple times a week. People are writing books right and left, and people must be reading them. I know I do, but how is your book doing so far? I know it's a little early to gauge it, but how's it doing?

SPEAKER_00 28:46

I don't really know because I don't have anything to judge it against. I've been happy, I've been happy that I've gotten reviews. Oh, good, and and they range, and that's fine. I'm I'm happy with that. And sure any review is a is a review. Right right. I did do an audiobook, and the audiobook was a really

Audiobook With Her Daughters

SPEAKER_00 29:12

phenomenally wonderful experience because I read all the sections that were happening in memory care. Oh, nice. My younger daughter read all the poetry in between. She is in fact a poet and a studier of poetry, and then my older daughter read all the younger me sections or the sections that were about the my daughters.

SPEAKER_01 29:42

You know what's funny? I just I just found your book on on Audible, and I just bought it, so I'm gonna listen to it. I'm about to go thank you. I'm about to go on a trip up to the mountains, and uh I'm gonna listen to it on the way up there.

SPEAKER_00 30:00

It takes about six hours, right? Bean, yeah, I listen to it. Five hours. It's about five hours. I've listened to a our voices are very definitely discernible, although people will tell you that we sound different. But one of the things that I had to let go of in that process was that when somebody else reads it, they put emphasis on different words or phrases in a sentence. And I did let that go and let it happen the way Wait a minute, I didn't write that. And I it just ended up being a phenomenally heartfelt, wonderful experience to have. And I they everyone tried to talk me out of it, with the exception of my publisher, who said, try it, see what happens. You know, if it doesn't work, you can always re-record it. And uh I I was so happy with how it ended up. Wonderful.

SPEAKER_01 30:58

Well, I'll definitely leave you a review when I'm all said and done for whatever it's worth. Thank you. Thank you. So uh I know it's still early in in this process. Do you have any plans to write another book? I'm working on poetry. All right, excellent, excellent, excellent. Well, I as as I suspected, we're gonna run out of time before I ran out of questions, but I'd definitely like to have you back maybe six months down the line after the book's had a chance to really play out. And and I have a lot more I'd like to get into about it. But is there a thought that you would like to impart to our listeners that would sort of embody, you know, all of this?

SPEAKER_00 31:43

Forgive

How To Find The Book

SPEAKER_00 31:44

yourself, trust yourself, know that you did the best you could, or that you're doing the best you can if you're in the middle of this process. And that if you wish to reach out to my website, there are plenty of people there who are willing to support you in this process. We're a hive, you know.

SPEAKER_01 32:04

I love that. I love that term. I people talk about community in a lot of different ways, but I like the analogy of a hive. In fact, I'm possibly gonna be getting some beekeeping over here at our little nonprofit farm that we have. So, how do people find the book? Obviously, you can find it on Audible because I found it pretty easily. But how how how does anybody find it and and and how do they find you? Your your website and all that.

SPEAKER_00 32:31

Well, you can certainly look up who will name the bees, and it will send you to my website where you can get to Audible and Barnes and Noble and Amazon and Goodreads and all of that. There's information on my website for book clubs. Should anyone wish for me to be a part of their a part of their book club? What else? The are the the books available, as I said, in paperback, ebook, and audiobook. And I think yeah, fans and readers are welcome, welcome, welcome to reach out. I have, I am doing something right now with the bee thing because my mother wanted to know who was going to name all the bees, and uh a hive of of you know 50,000 or two hives of 50,000 or more bees is pretty much impossible to do. I have asked people if they'd like to let me know who they are and what name they would like for a bee. And I'm going to find a way to put that up the website. I haven't gotten there yet, but I have the list on my desk and I'm ready to go.

SPEAKER_01 33:47

I love that. It's like naming a star. It's that's kind of cool. Well, sir, it's been an absolute pleasure. This has been a very enlightening conversation. And as I said, I'd definitely love to have you come back in a little while after the books had a chance to run for a bit and and go a little deeper into this. But thank you for joining me today.

SPEAKER_00 34:08

Well, that would be an honor, and thank you for your time. And I thank your listeners for theirs also. It's a privilege.

SPEAKER_01 34:15

Beautiful. Well, this has been another episode of the Healthy Living Podcast. I'm your host, Joe Grumbine, and I want to thank all of our listeners for making this show possible. And we will see you next time.