MEMORY HOUSE

In this memoir, a man recounts his struggles to remain close to his dementia-stricken wife.

Mason kept his wife at home as long as he could. Then, when her dementia got so bad that she wouldn’t let him help her, he was forced to send her to live at Memory House. “I come these days to Memory House and you talk for hours, and make no sense, except when you tell me you want to go where I can’t take you,” he writes, addressing his wife. “Finally I escape, but next day I’ll want to be with you. Meanwhile, I stay in the house we shared, and wash the dishes and pay the bills and feed the cats.” From then on, his wife essentially becomes two people: the woman he was married to for decades, a singer and animal lover, and the woman he visits at her nursing facility, a confused patient who forgets their daughter and doesn’t understand why she can’t go home. Similarly, his life is split between two houses: Memory House, filled with orderlies and doddering residents, and the House, his home in the hills west of Albany, filled with memories of his absent wife. The memoir becomes both a repository for these remembrances and a place to ruminate on the complex mix of grief, guilt, love, and longing that roils in his mind. Mason’s prose is stark and lyrical, boiled down into gutting statements and concise descriptions: “ ‘You’ve lost her,’ more than one person has said. ‘Do your grieving now. It will make things easier.’ If I had any sense, that’s what I’d do. But whenever I start to get sensible, I hear the music again, and I feel your hands around mine as we listen.” It’s a slim work at under 70 pages, but the author’s voice is so enchanting that readers will feel their throats clench after only a few paragraphs. Though the situation is surely a common one, Mason confronts it with a grasping vulnerability that is both endearing and devastating. It’s an affecting rumination on the impossibility of mourning someone who hasn’t yet died.

A poignant, poetic account about the intricacies of grief and love.