Book Review: The Geography of Memory: A Pilgrimage through Alzheimer's

Abstract

The Geography of Memory: Pilgrimage Through Alzheimer's. By Jeanne Murray Walker. New York: Center Street, 2013. ISBN 978-1-4555-4498-1. $22.00. In The Geography of Memory: Pilgrimage Through Alzheimer's, Jeanne Murray Walker guides readers over a terrain expected to be bleak and harsh--territory they might dread to traverse and might prefer to bypass: the landscape of a mother's gradual decline into Alzheimer's. The subject is of widespread concern as the prevalence of this merciless illness in today's aging population has resulted in many families being touched by the helpless despair of watching a beloved parent or grandparent gradually slip away from them, from reality and, eventually, from essential selfhood. The cruelty of dementia horrifies, and we might be tempted to avoid reading a personal account of a family's experience with it. Despite such reservations when I first picked up Walker's autobiographical book, I soon discovered that hers is not a morbid, despairing account of loss. Rather, it is a powerful, insightfully written, and well-crafted account of positive discovery--discovery or recovery of the past, discovery of family, discovery of relationships, and ultimately discovery of self. Walker acknowledges the lessons learned from her mother, Erna Kelly, as she declined, even after she had lost the ability to speak, namely, lessons about and death (xix). Beginning at the end of a decade-long ordeal, with the phone call that brings the news of her mothers death, Walker structures a journey into memory, a narrative that weaves together a chronological account of her mothers decline with flashbacks that often lead her to surprising revelations about family relationships and about formative events in her own life. Importantly, the author simultaneously traces her own spiritual pilgrimage that led her away from her upbringing in Baptist fundamentalism into a faith that embraces image and ritual. With a literature professors affection for the written word and with a poet's precision of language and sensitivity to symbol and concrete detail, Walker tells her story realistically but without harshness, affectionately but without sentimentality, soberly but with a delicate sense of humor. Walker first notices subtle changes in Erna's behavior in 1998. She is troubled by her mother's painting of heavy, navy blue, vindictive-looking storm clouds looming over her childhood farmhouse (13). She feels panic on discovering her mother's freezer surprisingly overstocked with roasts, her desk drawer in a state of uncharacteristic chaos. Erna behaves strangely at a Christmas party held in her honor. She is vague about her finances. It becomes apparent to Walker that her mother needs to be cared for, but Erna has always maintained her dignity and independence, insisting on strict privacy, indeed secrecy, about all financial matters. During the course of Erna's increasing confusion, Walker says she began drifting into another country (59). At the same time, landscapes of her own childhood memories in Lincoln, Nebraska, return vividly to Walker: A riff opens in my quotidian life and memories thrust up like prehistoric mountains ... (45). She observes, As [my mother] lost her memory, I gained mine (xviii). In exploring these landscapes of the past, Walker comes to understand her parents and her family relationships in a new way. She recalls her parents' important role in establishing Lincoln Christian School where she received a solid educational foundation. She recalls her mother's remarkable strength in bringing up her children alone after her husband's death. Walker realizes for the first time how her subversive mother had unwittingly influenced her own nonconformity and youthful rebellion. The inevitable conflicts that arise over her mother's care direct Walker's memory back to the first important conflict she had had with her mother--a conflict over a kitschy fluorescent (192) green plastic cross that Jeanne purchased at Bible camp when she was ten. …