Also, I imagine it keeps my mind sharp. I know people who are experiencing cognitive difficulties. There but for the grace of God, go I.
Millions of people are dealing with situations brought on by cognitive declines. Dementia in its many forms impacts some of us each day. The novelist L. Annette Binder went through that experience with her mother. Binder watched closely as this woman so dear to her was fading away.
She wrote about their journey together and that process in her memoir “Child of Earth and Starry Heaven.” Perhaps you are thinking; why would I want to read about that? It sounds depressing. In Binder’s able hands this situation becomes informative, inspiring, and affirming.
The author came here with her parents from Germany. She has fond memories of a mother who was strong-willed, highly intelligent, opinionated, and independent. As her mother began having mental lapses Binder, her only child, arranged to move her from Colorado to New Hampshire to be close by.
Slowly her mother’s world shrank. She eventually moved to a memory care facility. Her daughter visited her almost every day. She researched the disease; what might have caused it? And what are the treatments that are available? She gave her mother the thing she needed most; her love.
Binder writes: “You can drive yourself mad if you read all the news articles about factors that might lead to dementia. There are so many possible causes and so many correlates, but the reality seems more straightforward than all the journals might suggest. The truth is, absent a genetic link to the disease, we don’t yet know most of the time why one person suffers from the disease and another doesn’t. Scientists are navigating only the coastline, and dementia remains a vast unexplored continent.”
That’s another lovely aspect of this memoir, we are in the presence of a formidable prose stylist. Binder’s previous book was a novel, “The Vanishing Sky.”
It was inspired by something she learned about her father. She tried to imagine things he did during the war. She regretted never asking him about it while he was alive.
The other residents of the memory care facility flit through these pages like so many ghosts. When her mother moved there she brought along her elderly cat. Cats were not allowed and they had to find another home for it. The next day Binder was astonished to find her mom with a mechanical cat on her lap. She didn’t seem to realize it wasn’t a real cat anymore.
That hit her; mom’s cognitive decline was well underway. There’s humor here, irony, and affection. As a girl she said inappropriate things around her mother’s friends.
Eventually, her mother’s inhibitions were gone-she began saying things that embarrassed her daughter. The circle of life keeps on spinning. What comes around, goes around.
Vick Mickunas of Yellow Springs interviews authors every Saturday at 7 a.m. and on Sundays at 10:30 a.m. on WYSO-FM (91.3). For more information, visit www.wyso.org/programs/book-nook. Contact him at vick@vickmickunas.com.
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