And I awoke and found me here

Abstract

Strange Relation: A Memoir of Marriage, Dementia, and Poetry Rachel Hadas. Paul Dry Books, 2011. Pp 204. US$16·95. ISBN 978-1-58988-061-0 The title above, a line from Keats’s poem La Belle Dame Sans Merci, is also a chapter heading in Strange Relation: A Memoir of Marriage, Dementia, and Poetry, Rachel Hadas’s account of her experience of caring for her husband George Edwards, a composer and professor of music at Columbia University, NY, USA, who was diagnosed in 2005 at the age of 61 years with dementia. Hadas is a teacher and poet and her memoir is simultaneously a highly personal narrative about the agony of watching her husband succumb to the ravages of a terrible illness—his diagnosis is thought to be either frontotemporal dementia or atypical Alzheimer’s disease—and a celebration of the power of literature, and in particular poetry, to shed light on the various experiences of the dementia suff erer and his carer. Hadas’s story is a sadly familiar one to those of us who have looked after people with dementia, especially the young-onset variety: George’s insidious personality changes are for years attributed to depression or a mid-life crisis; he fi nally becomes unable to compose and to teach music at the peak of his career. The author fi nds herself like Keats’s knight disorientated and alone on a “cold hill’s side”, with a sense of “ambiguous loss” as she shares a home with a man who is physically present but in other respects no longer there. Through her own poetry, as well as that of others as diverse as Larkin, Homer, Cavafy, and Hardy, Hadas captures exquisitely what we would prosaically, and inadequately, term the carer’s experience. Her poem Push Me Pull You, for example, is about the aggression she disconcertingly feels when delivering the news of her husband’s disorder to others. In Monodrama she describes her husband as being “walled into silence”, brick by brick. There is humour here, too, when her husband undergoes cognitive testing as mandated by his health insurance company to prove his illness and “fail[s] with fl ying colours”, or when Hadas, after writing persuasively of the importance of simile in helping illuminate the utterly strange world she and George have come to inhabit, mentions an encounter with a well meaning neurologist who deploys a spectacularly misjudged simile of his own to describe her diffi culties in coming to terms with George’s illness, likening her situation to delays in unpacking after moving house. Rich, sometimes unbearably moving and always beautifully written, Strange Relation is essential reading for anybody, professional or otherwise, involved in the care of people with dementia.