The Geography of Memory: A Pilgrimage Through Alzheimer's - Hardcover

Walker, Jeanne Murray

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1455544981 ISBN 13: 9781455544981

Publisher: Center Street, 2013

Synopsis

Tens of millions of Americans either suffer from Alzheimer's or care for someone who does. In a single generation, that number will triple. Jeanne Murray Walker's memoir speaks with compassionate wisdom about the gifts that wait to be discovered even in the midst of this grim disease. As Walker cares for her mother during her heartrending decline, she, her sister and her mother develop closer ties. The intimate look at illness and death-hardly acknowledged by our culture-becomes another sort of gift and after spending thousands of hours with her mother, Jeanne begins to recover her own early memories and understand her history in a transformative way. THE GEOGRAPHY OF MEMORY reveals that for all the grim news about Alzheimer's, it is possible to find joy and hope in the midst of pain.

The story is made up of three braided strands. Two are narrative: the present story of caring for her mother and the past story of Walker's childhood memories. The third strand is a series of pithy Field Notes that anchor the book in practical reflections on memory. Interwoven are chapters which flash back to Walker's teenage battles with her feisty, valiant, widowed mother. Only because Walker slowed down and spent thousands of hours in the company of her mother during the last decade of her life was she able to recover these memories. The field notes are short, poetic pauses in the narrative that address memory: what it is, how it works, how it can be strengthened, what happens when it goes away.

Geography of Memory is the hopeful story about Alzheimer's that readers are waiting to hear.

About this title

Product Description

The Geography of Memory The author describes how she found hope and joy through forgotten childhood memories while caring for her mother over thousands of hours as she suffered through the heartbreaking mental decline of Alzheimer's.

Review

"Alzheimer's and death of a parent is a journey that others have told us about but few with such penetration and humane wisdom as Jeanne Walker's. Her story is a map of memory with mythical overtones, by which I mean that while its shape is recognizable, its details are utterly unique. I read it, mesmerized, wondering my way through this deeply moving portrait of a mother, a daughter, a family. Against expectation we are invited to join their hilarious, daunting dance: a boogie of decline whose haunting music persists."--Luci Shaw, poet, author of The Crime of Living Cautiously and What the Light Was Like, writer in residence at Regent College

"With THE GEOGRAPHY OF MEMORY, Jeanne Murray Walker, a master wordsmith, takes us on a journey-dare I say sacred pilgrimage-into the inner world of Alzheimer's. While Walker does not flinch from the calamities and sorrows of this journey, she also provides us with fresh glimpses into hidden joys and startling surprises along the way. I commend THE GEOGRAPHY OF MEMORY to you."--Richard J. Foster, author of Celebration of Discipline and Sanctuary of the Soul

"In a kind of family alchemy, a mother's failing memory somehow excites the synapses of her daughter's. The result is a child-adult memoir of grace, poignancy, and rich compassion."--Philip Yancey, bestselling author
"As the lively, witty, energetic character who was her mother begins to become hopelessly lost in Alzheimer's, poet Jeanne Walker readily shoulders her share of caregiving, a commitment of love requiring three-hour plane rides: disrupting the rhythms of her own life as a wife, mother, and professor, disquieting her with grief, and taxing her relationship with her beloved sister almost to the breaking point.

Yet the narrative as a whole says much more. At some point, knowing so well the story of her mother's life, Walker begins to find her crazy communications intelligible-realizing that her mother is talking in metaphors and understanding them. The farther away her mother wanders, the closer their relationship. The love between them strengthens. Trying to follow the details of her mother's life as she recalls them, now, in fragments, Walker finds to her surprise that she is not only recovering her own childhood memories but also understanding them in a new way-a set of insights ranking among the most precious of her life.

In plainsong prose evoking her heartland roots, Jeanne Walker locates the gifts to be found in the darkest days of a loved one's decline and death, a story of redemption that will inform and encourage anyone caring or expecting to care for ill and aging parents-or anyone at all."--Peggy Anderson, author of New York Times bestsellers Nurse and Children's Hospital

"Alzheimer's is a word that strikes terror in most of us, particularly as we and our parents age. Poet Jeanne Murray Walker's memoir of her pilgrimage in her mother's illness and death doesn't gloss the difficulties, but it removes the terror. What remains is a sturdy witness to unexpected meanings and beauties and even humor that surface in lives of faith and suffering. A friend once told me 'Anything can be endured if you make a story of it.' This magnificently written story is the latest evidence."--Eugene H. Peterson, professor Emeritus of Spiritual Theology Regent College, Vancouver B.C.

"Jeanne Murray Walker's story of a mother with Alzheimer's, like reports from other recent conflicts, is disorienting. How could it be otherwise? There are no "front lines," no clear distinctions between friends and enemies. How did this war even get started? How will it end-and what would "victory" look like? Maybe, she suggests, we need to see this disease with fresh eyes. "As I spent thousands of hours with her," Walker says of her mother, "I began to recover my own past." There's nothing syrupy about this book, but it's full of joy as well as sorrow. What a gift she has given us."--John Wilson, editor, Books & Culture

"Jeanne Murray Walker has written one of the most elegant, tender, and intelligent memoirs of Alzheimer's I have read. At once heart-wrenching and richly rewarding, intimate and objective, coldly cutting, and full of clear-eyed promise, THE GEOGRAPHY OF MEMORY is a beautiful gathering of moments: an artful mosaic of shards that build to a portrait of faith and hope and love."--Bret Lott, author of Letters and Life: On Being a Writer, On Being a Christian and Jewel

"In describing her mother's long passage into dementia and its reverberations through a family, Jeanne Murray Walker has given us a powerful tale of loss but also renewal, pain but also love. In simple yet beautiful language, she shows how the light of hope and grace can illuminate even the darkest journey. For many, many readers THE GEOGRAPHY OF MEMORY will be a treasure."--Alan Jacobs, author of The Narnian

"Those of us who've accompanied a beloved parent through the valley of the shadow will instantly recognize the terrain in this lyrical and profoundly wise account of aging unto death. Jeanne Murray Walker's THE GEOGRAPHY OF MEMORY is, hands down, one of the most beautiful books I've ever read."--Paula Huston, author of Simplifying the Soul and A Season of Mystery

"This book is not about "silver linings," though the author believes "the news about Alzheimer's is more hopeful than what we hear on the street." Fully acknowledging the anxieties, frustrations, bewilderment, and tensions that arise in caring for a parent with dementia, Jeanne Murray Walker manages to lead us through those rocky passages to a place not only of acceptance but of fascination and gratitude for the way that such caregiving brings her to new terms with her own memories, with the legacy of stories that are now hers to tell, and with shifting roles that offer rigorous lessons in humility and compassion. The way her own stories mingle with her mother's mirrors a striking truth about how what we call our own life stories are composites, our materials recycled, and everything we call "ours," a gift from those who continue to shape us even as they take their leave."--Marilyn McEntyre, author of Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies

Edition details

• Publisher: Center Street
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1455544981
• ISBN 13: 9781455544981
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368