Stranger With A Spoon: Stories of Long Goodbyes Through Carers’ Eyes
At Nourish Group, our work has always been grounded in one principle: that understanding the lived experience of people is the starting point for any strategy worth building. We listen before we design. We sit with complexity before we recommend.
That same principle sits at the heart of our first published book.
Stranger With A Spoon: Stories of Long Goodbyes Through Carers’ Eyes is a collection of short stories drawn from the real experiences of people caring for someone living with dementia. Written by Nourish Group Founder Dana Thomson, the book was born not from a desk but from months of conversations — careful, unhurried, often difficult conversations with carers who had never quite been asked to tell their story before.
Why This Book Exists
Dementia affects more than half a million Australians and is now the leading cause of death of Australian women. By 2058, that number is projected to exceed one million. But for every person living with dementia, there is at least one person — often several — carrying the weight of their care. Quietly. Invisibly. Often without enough support, information, or simply someone to say: I see what you are doing. It matters.
Dana’s parallel body of work is with Patient Experience Agency, a specialist consultancy who bring the lived experience of users in the care industries into health, disability and aged care projects. Many pieces of work converged at a national roundtable on dementia navigator design convened with University of Technology Sydney (UTS) in February 2026, which made clear to us that carers are the most underserved stakeholders in the dementia journey. They navigate a health system that was not designed with them in mind. They make decisions under pressure with incomplete information. They grieve someone who is still alive.
Stranger With A Spoon is a small act of witness to that experience. It does not offer solutions. It offers recognition — and being seen, we have come to believe, is its own kind of care.
About the Book
The stories in Stranger With A Spoon are interconnected — linked by emotion, by recurring objects, by the rhythms of a life organised around someone else’s needs. They trace the arc of what it means to care for a person with dementia: the early confusion, the gradual relinquishing of the person you knew, the dark humour that keeps carers going, the moments of unexpected grace.
The title comes from one of those moments. A spoon. A partner becomes a stranger. A gradual change of role in a living change journey.
These are not case studies. They are not clinical accounts. They are literature — written with care, written with consent, and written in the belief that stories do something that data cannot: they make us feel less alone.
The Bigger Picture
This book is part of a broader and ongoing commitment by Nourish Group, Patient Experience Agency and Dana Thomson to the dementia care landscape in Australia. Alongside the patient experience and roundtable work, Dana is supporting work to develop a philanthropy-led dementia navigator model — a dedicated expert guide for families navigating the health system through a dementia diagnosis. We believe Australia needs this. We intend to help build it.
Stranger With A Spoon is both a standalone piece of work and a contribution to that larger conversation — one that we hope will find its way into the hands of carers, healthcare professionals, policy makers, and anyone who wants to understand what this journey really asks of people.
Where to Find It
Stranger With A Spoon: Stories of Long Goodbyes Through Carers’ Eyes by Dana Thomson is available now on Amazon.
Find Stranger with a Spoon on Booktopia
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