Next Best Thing: A Memoir of What Remains When Family Fails

Four words changed Sarah Spector's life. I will get him.

She typed them into her phone in September 2018, while her cousin Abby lay dying in a Los Angeles hospital and someone had to decide what happened to Abby's step-father. His name was Peter. Everyone called him Schatzi, German for treasure, the name his late wife gave him. He had Parkinson's, a heavy accent, a habit of mumbling, and no one left.

Sarah was not his daughter. She was not his next of kin. She was a CPA with a full life and a family she had spent more than a decade keeping at a distance. She was, as he put it, the next best thing.

What followed was four years inside a system that was not built for a man like Schatzi. Nursing homes that lost track of him. A conservatorship that moved at its own pace while he did not. Gambling, elder abuse reports, a pandemic that locked every door, and a man who kept calling the police on the people trying to help him.

Told with text messages, emails, and legal documents exactly as they were written, Next Best Thing is a record of what eldercare actually looks like from the inside. It is also a book about what family means when the people who are supposed to show up do not, and about the friends and strangers who did.

It is unsparing about the institutions, and pretty much everything else. It is far funnier than it has any right to be.

For anyone who has become the person who handles it.