MY DISAPPEARING MOTHER

Finnamore presents a memoir and biography that she wrote as she was losing her mother to illness.

In 2017, the author returned to her home state of California from North Carolina to be with her mother, Bunny Mathews, who was suffering from dementia. In addition to relying on friends, practicing self-care, and using talk therapy, she used the act of writing to cope with her grief and frustration. Finnamore recorded her mother’s decline, as well as her own thoughts, but she also reflected on her family’s past. Bunny was born in Puerto Rico in 1935, and an aunt in New York City adopted her when she was 2 years old. Her new family moved to Los Angeles in the 1940s, and Bunny went on to live a varied life in California: as a wife twice, as a professional clairvoyant, and as a mother of two children. She enjoyed reading books, wearing Christmas earrings, eating Hostess Ding Dongs, and dancing, although dementia would eventually rob her of these and other memories. Her family kept a “Parade of Faces” of her loved ones in a photo slideshow on a TV screen to try to help Bunny remember those closest to her. Finnamore shares newly found family secrets and long-loved recipes for Puerto Rican foods. She presents this material in short vignettes that aren’t chronological but organized into three sections: “What Was Lost,” “What Was Found,” and “What Remains.” Finnamore uses many metaphors for her mother’s condition, but the dominant one is that dementia is like “the most foreign country I know, the least charted.” When the author interacted with her mother, she had to navigate a place where the rules were neither clear nor consistent. Sometimes Bunny remembered her, and other times she screamed for her to leave. Anyone familiar with this type of disorienting experience will feel Finnamore’s honesty and courage in these pages, and the fact that the stories don’t appear in order reinforces the feeling of how sufferers and caretakers alike lose touch with time.

Short but rich observations of a family’s history and traditions.