My Father's ALS: A Son's Healing Journey
by Ken Kann
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My Father's ALS: A Son's Healing Journey tells the horrific and heroic story of the relentless paralysis of Sam Kann from ALS. It’s the tale of one family’s encounter with a brutal disease. And it’s a story of clashes between son and father. Ken was from the rebellious postwar baby boom generation; Sam was a conventional parent formed in the Depression, World War II, and affluent postwar suburbs. Sam needed Ken to help him with ALS, and that brought Ken back home to the project of growing up. Sam’s struggle to survive the ALS calamity, his desperation as a sudden quadriplegic, culminated with his request to Ken for help with suicide. They made a plan. But events did not go as planned.
Praise for My Father’s ALS: A Son’s Healing Journey
“a must-read as we contemplate life’s meanings and the unknowns that may confront any of us.”
— Rabbi Ted Feldman, Petaluma
“a quiet and moving account of how being needed as a son led to his becoming more fully a man.”
— Dr. Elizabeth Anderson
“a must-read for anyone who is faced with the task of caring for and supporting a loved one with a tragic, progressive illness. There is a bounty of instruction, stoic wisdom and comfort within its pages.”
— Nathan M. Bass, MD, PhD
“this book will touch your heart as you travel through the fifteen-month journey of a son’s deepening love and respect for his father.”
— Rob Kann, Ken's Younger Brother
“a gripping account of one family and one son trying to cope with a father's ALS. The predicament is dire, the stories are absorbing, the characters are vivid, and the writing is beautiful.”
— Mary Ann Wittenberg, wife of ALS patient and author Harry Wittenberg and board member at the ALS Network
“It’s a tale with many dimensions told with novelistic confidence”
— Peter Booth Wiley, Author and Publisher
About Ken
Kenneth Kann was a UC Berkeley historian in 1979 when his father Sam was diagnosed with ALS. Ken immediately discovered that the youth uprising of the 1960s and 1970s had left him unprepared for Sam’s devastating illness. After years of clashes, Ken faced helping his father Sam encounter the dread disease ALS, the subject of his forthcoming book My Father's ALS: A Son's Healing Journey. After Sam died in 1980, Ken changed careers, became a successful litigation attorney, and later was a director of the government agency that administers the California court system. He married and had a daughter. He has written two popular history books: Comrades and Chicken Ranchers: the Story of a California Jewish Community (Cornell University Press, 1993) and Joe Rapoport: the Life of a Jewish Radical (Temple University Press. 1981).
