There’s a word that may strike more fear into many of us than even cancer — Alzheimer’s. Alzheimer’s disease is the sixth-leading cause of death in the United States. More than five million Americans are living with it, and by 2050 that number could triple, according to the Alzheimer’s Association.
The facts are dire and so are many of the books on the subject. After she lost her mother to Alzheimer’s disease, Jeanne Murray Walker read many of them and found grim descriptions of a horror coming to many of us.
“I read in a New York Times op-ed that fear of the disease could cause children to abandon their parents, and parents to consider suicide rather than live with dementia,” Walker said. “From my own experience, I wanted to offer hope to Alzheimer’s patients, their spouses and children.”
A poet and English professor at the University of Delaware, Walker published “The Geography of Memory: A Pilgrimage Through Alzheimer’s” (Center Street, $22) in 2013.
“While taking care of a parent or loved one with the disease can be frustrating, exhausting and heartbreaking, I learned that to stay and struggle through Alzheimer’s is to reap gifts that may not have come any other way,” she said. “I came to see it not just as a slog, but as a pilgrimage that is redemptive.”
Walker’s memoir not only tells her mother’s story during the last 10 years of her life, it reveals a fuller picture of her mother’s personality through the stories she told her children and through the writer’s own childhood recollections.
“Ironically, as mother lost her memory, I began to regain mine. Getting in touch with old memories can bring wonderful insight into who you are.” Walker said.
Caring for an aging parent who has dementia has “the potential to blow a family to smithereens or form new bonds, as was the case in our family,” Walker said.
Separated by distance, work, politics and lifestyle, Walker and her sister committed to caring for their mother together and bridged the gaps through emails, visits and phone calls.
“It’s hard to work through differences. She’s more impulsive and I’m more reflective,” Walker said. “She lived in the same town as mother and I did not, but we had to work through it like a marriage. We got to know each other on a deep level.”
That sisterly bond has extended to their children and grandchildren, who now know each other better and visit regularly.
The experience also helped Walker grow as a person.
“My mother taught me first-hand about death and dying,” she said. “You don’t think about developmental stages with the elderly, but there are. I came to understand that my mother was speaking a different language based more on metaphor and feeling than literal sense. Because I knew her stories, I sometimes understood what she meant. She went through changes, but was always a person.”
Finally, Walker learned about spiritual discipline.
“Sometimes I just about went crazy, and when you’re worn to a nubbin you find that you just have to be still and let go,” she said.
Slowing down to reflect on the journey, allowed Walker to write a memoir that offers meaning to many.
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