This memoir about the love-hate relationship of the author with her difficult parents (a miserly artist mother and a dour, strict, even cruel, school-teacher father) and the emotional toll of looking after them in their final years of physical decline and dementia will remind many readers of their similar experiences with losses and missed opportunities. But there is little here that could be considered a profound insight into human nature and the story lacks the wickedly morbid humour of fellow Canadian Meg Federico’s 2009 memoir, Welcome to the Departure Lounge, dealing with the same subject matter. I read the latter years ago and will reread it and review it in a few weeks.
The family dynamics, with competition for recognition and affection, the resentment of siblings perceived to be parental favourites, or resentment for not doing their share in caregiving, and the eccentricities that inevitably develop in some members of a large extended family, make for interesting reading that are easy to relate to. I easily related to the description of the culture of small town western Ontario; although Hay never divulges an address, I could fairly accurately pinpoint on a map where the family lived in Renfrew, Wiarton, Guelph, Owen Sound, Mitchell, London and Ottawa, having lived in Owen Sound, London, and Ottawa and visited all the other towns and cities.
In this family there seems to be an excess of hugging and kissing, perhaps to compensate for deeply ambiguous true feelings. And it is apparently easy for all the family members to take offence at what others do, don’t do, or say or don’t say, with easily bruised egos, insecurities and low self-esteem. The author declined, unwisely in my humble opinion, to engage in ‘therapeutic lying’ when her demented mother repeatedly asks where her husband is or if he is joining them for a walk several months after his death. See the late Oliver Sacks’ discussion reproduced in the March 4, 2019 issue of The New Yorker for a compelling argument for compassionate lying in such circumstances.
Hay never acknowledges taking liberties with the dialogue, but, unless she lived with a hidden recorder, the nonsensical ranting of her demented mother, among other dialogues, must be paraphrased. Likewise, she claims to recall events from her life as a two-year-old, although studies show that accurate memory recall by adults never includes anything before age 3.5.
There are probably many older readers like me who develop anxiety reading about the descent into dependency and dementia, wondering if that lies in their future. Perhaps that is, at least in part, why I am ambivalent about recommending this book, even though it is very well written. At the very least, common experiences such as those narrated here, provide a powerful argument for liberalizing advance directive and right-to-die laws.
The Passionate Reader 