A brief, moving hybrid work that pays tribute to one woman and her daughter.
Lynn’s debut memoir shares her struggle to care for her mother, whose mind slowly disintegrated from Alzheimer’s disease.
Lynn and her mother, Barbara Durling Miller, a retired executive secretary, hadn’t always seen eye to eye. Yet their relationship inevitably changed and in some ways deepened after Barbara was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Barbara was first cared for by her husband, but eventually she had to move to full-time residential care. The family disagreed at times about her care, and finding an appropriate facility proved a challenge. One treated her dementia with psychiatric medication; another typically treated less incapacitated patients. By the time Lynn’s mother was placed in a healthy environment, many of her memories and mental capacities had disappeared. Lynn writes movingly, and no doubt for fellow caregivers, comfortingly, about finding peaceful and loving moments with her mother even during advanced stages of the disease. The book includes Lynn’s poetry, which sometimes indulge in clichés—e.g. using butterflies to represent hope—but often contains striking, resonant lines as well. For example, Lynn observes that the necessary decluttering of the living space of an Alzheimer’s patient reflects the gradual fading of their pre-illness personalities: “Yet every time I visit / Your home has one less you.” She also writes insightfully about the particular pain of mourning a parent; watching her mother’s memories of Lynn’s childhood disintegrate felt like losing a bit of her own history. Lynn provides advice for caregivers ranging from the utilitarian (a chart comparing residential care options) to the personal (thoughts on grieving before the patient dies). Filled with photographs and poems as well as prose, the book won’t replace any comprehensive guide for Alzheimer’s caregivers. But Lynn’s honesty and insight may comfort fellow caregivers.
A brief, moving hybrid work that pays tribute to one woman and her daughter.Pub Date: May 19, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5043-7513-9
Page Count: 216
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: July 10, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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