The Geography of Memory: A Pilgrimage Through Alzheimer's

by Jeanne Murray Walker

Overview

Award-winning poet Jeanne Murray Walker tells an extraordinarily wise, witty, and quietly wrenching tale of her mother's long passage into dementia. This powerful story explores parental love, profound grief, and the unexpected consolation of memory. While Walker does not flinch from the horrors of "the ugly twins, aging and death," her eye for the apt image provides a window into unexpected joy and humor even during the darkest days.

This is a multi-layered narrative of generations, faith, and friendship. As Walker leans in to the task of caring for her mother, their relationship unexpectedly deepens and becomes life-giving. Her mother's memory, which more and more dwells in the distant past, illuminates Walker's own childhood. She rediscovers and begins to understand her own past, as well as to enter more fully into her mother's final years.

THE GEOGRAPHY OF MEMORY is not only a personal journey made public in the most engaging, funny, and revealing way possible, here is a story of redemption for anyone who is caring for or expecting to care for ill and aging parents -- and for all the rest of us as well.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781455544981
Publisher:	Center Street
Publication date:	09/03/2013
Pages:	360
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Jeanne Murray Walker's poems and essays have appeared in many periodicals, including Poetry, the Georgia Review, American Poetry Review, Image, the Atlantic Monthly, and Best American Poetry. Among her awards are an NEA Fellowship, eight Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowships, a Prairie-Schooner Glenna Luschei Prize, and a Pew Fellowship in The Arts. She is Professor of English at The University of Delaware as well as a mentor in the Seattle Pacific University Low Residency MFA Program. In her spare time Jeanne aspires to garden, to cook, to travel, and to read novels.

Read an Excerpt

The Geography of Memory

A Pilgrimage Through Alzheimer's

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By Jeanne Murray Walker

Center Street

Copyright © 2013 Jeanne Murray Walker
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4555-4498-1

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CHAPTER 1

THE PHONE CALL

Far away, as if through a mist, I hear my husband calling. Swimming up from a dream, I roll over, open my eyes. He's leaning on one elbow in bed, facing me, softly repeating my name. In the milky gloom, I can barely make out his figure.

"What?" I ask. We're in Paris in a hotel room. That much I remember. I push farther down into the warm sheets. I don't get back to sleep easily.

"I think something's happened to your mother," he says.

Sitting bolt upright in the dark, I watch as my husband swabs the floor for his phone. There's a cold breeze leaking in the closed windows. I pull the duvet around my shoulders and press the stem of my watch, which lights up the dial. It's two thirty a.m.

My husband is mistaken, I think. How can he know that something is wrong with my mother? She's in Dallas.

He's jumpy. We're both jumpy after the recent news: that my mother's been in a car accident; that the Christian Care Center is moving her to the Alzheimer's unit; that she needs hospice care; that she has broken her hip.

He sits in bed pushing buttons on his cell phone, pressing the phone against his ear. The curtains ripple. A monotonous, vengeful January wind whips the trees outside.

"Hi, Rich," my husband says. Rich is my brother-in-law in Dallas.

Silence. My husband looks troubled.

He takes the phone from his ear. "Your mother has died," he says.

I try to believe this, but I don't understand it. I might as well be a stone, unable to feel water pouring over its back. How did he know she was dying? Did she visit him? I wonder. Did he feel her leaving?

He holds out his phone.

I take it.

"We were with her," Rich tells me. "She was asleep. She didn't seem to be in pain. She just never woke up."

With dementia, finally the brain and lungs shut down. But the progress of the disease varies so much with each victim that no one can predict in what month or even what year the end will come. I thought, as her doctors did, that we had many months to go.

Outside, the gnarled treetops boom and crack as they thrash in the wind. When the trees go, I think wildly, everything is in danger. Whipping branches cast shadows against the filmy curtains. My mind keeps slipping its groove, slipping its groove like a vinyl record. Rich goes on talking, this man who has lived through so many emergencies, offering me valuable facts in his calm voice.

"Her favorite aide was with her. And her hospice nurse."

"I'm glad."

I'm not glad. I don't feel a thing. But one has to say something.

"You want to talk to Julie?" Rich offers.

"Yes."

"Don't feel like you have to come home," Julie says immediately.

"I want to."

"Don't you have another week to teach?"

I fumble for the answer.

The program. Oh, yes, she must mean the University program I'm teaching this month in London. How much longer does it run? I can't remember.

My husband is pulling on his clothes. When he flicks on the light, the massive ornate furniture rears up around us: a walnut dresser, the maroon duvet with a giant green and burgundy and white paisley pattern. He stands at the window, lifting the curtain at one corner to look out. I feel as if I'm watching a movie of someone else's life.

"How many students do you have?" Julie asks.

"Twenty."

"You can't leave them in the middle of the program, can you?"

"I don't know. I want to come home," I say, hoping I really do.

"I can take care of things here," Julie says.

By things, she must mean the body. The body that held me before I came into the world, the body that held her. She means my mother's body has to be buried, the final thing we can do for her. My mother looked like a little hollowed-out canoe a month ago, when I last saw her. She weighed barely a hundred pounds.

For almost a decade my sister and I together have taken care of our mother's clothes, her medicine, her friends, her housing. We've gone fifty-fifty, each with different tasks. Julie, who lives close to her in Dallas, makes quick trips to check in with her weekly. She and Rich entertain her at lunch on Sunday. They take care of her finances. I fly to Dallas four or five times a year and stay with her for a week, or part of a week, to wash her clothes, buy her shoes with rubber soles, take her to lunch in a restaurant, encourage her friends to keep visiting her, bring candy to her nurses, stock her apartment with flowers, whatever needs to be done. For years Julie and I have been phoning and e-mailing one another about what might keep Mother safe and occupied and challenged. As we cluck and fuss over her, we are getting to know one another better, coming to rely on one another.

I understand that this, too, has come to an end. I understand it better than I understand that my mother is dead.

"Promise me something," I say to Julie.

"What?"

"That we'll still see one another."

"Sure," Julie replies.

She means it, I can tell; I just don't believe her. Both our lives are monopolized by children and houses and demanding jobs.

"Mother would want us to," I tell her. "You promise?"

"Okay."

"Really?"

"Yeah." But without a crisis, I wonder what will bring us together.

The wind rattles the glass in the windows. It sounds cold and hysterical. My husband is going through the receipts in his billfold, glancing over at me from time to time.

"Can I let you know our plans tomorrow?" I ask Julie.

"Sure."

"We'll call the kids and tell them what's happened."

"Okay. And if you can't come home, we really are okay here," Julie says.

I look at my watch. My mother died on January 27, 2008.

It's a long night. Time slows down, lengthens out. We sleep fitfully, or rather, we don't sleep, lying in a semiwakeful stupor of demonic, distorted thoughts and images. The prayer I have been teaching our three-year-old granddaughter comes to me in the bell-like clarity of Sophia's voice. O Lord, support us all the day long, until the shadows lengthen, and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done. Then in your mercy, grant us a safe lodging and a holy rest, and peace at the last. O Lord, support us all the day long, until the shadows lengthen, and the evening comes.

The evening, I think. The evening means Death.

CHAPTER 2

THE CHOICE

The next day, charcoal clouds hang low over Paris and the air outside the window of our hotel is heavy and gray. We drink coffee and eat croissants in a neighborhood hole-in-the-wall, while locating an Internet café on our brightly colored tourist map. Then we pull on our hats and coats and gloves and step out into the bitter January wind to search for it. It's Sunday. We called the children first thing. Now we need to e-mail my office to let them know that I have to leave the program. Or maybe that I'll stay.

I need to settle this.

The trouble is, I can't remember the names of streets. A few minutes after I see a name on the side of a building, it's gone. A windshield wiper keeps everything clean and blank in my head. I am supposed to be the navigator, but we wander like homeless people through the damp fog. Finally we notice that we've circled past the same shops several times. We stop in a computer store so my husband can ask for directions in his elementary French, which is better than mine. Then we start out again, in the opposite direction, where the salesperson has told him, in French, to go. Following this route for a mile or so, we turn left and then right, and then left again, but we find no Internet café. So my husband steps into a stationers' to ask again.

My feet are so brittle and icy that I can no longer use my toes for balance. I feel as if any moment I may topple over. I open and shut my hands inside my gloves to get the blood going. With dismay I begin to recognize buildings. We're looping back toward the restaurant where we had breakfast. It's getting dark and we have wandered for almost the whole day, it seems to me, though when I look at my watch, I discover that it's only eleven. We again hone our attention like zombies to find some Internet café. I must confer with my university administrators. We must decide whether to fly home.

By noon we are exhausted and frozen. Finding ourselves close to Notre Dame Cathedral in surreal darkness, we allow ourselves to be carried along by a stream of worshippers. We drift by the immense flying buttresses, beside the tall stone angels and saints, through the massive doors rimmed with multiple levels of sitting and standing granite figures. Who gets to sit, I wonder, and who has had to stand up in this cathedral entryway for seven hundred years?

In the gloom of the interior, my eyes take time to adjust. Overcast daylight shines through the splinters of stained glass in the great rose window, illuminating points of turquoise and sapphire and cobalt blue. I hang on to these pricks of light with my eyes as we sit down on wooden chairs in the cavernous nave. Notre Dame is a tourist destination, but it looks like we are surrounded by French people, mainly. Each is stylish, with a clever hat here or a distinctive tie pin there or an orange scarf. The man sitting beside me is bundled in a bold black-and-white houndstooth checked coat.

Above us soars the vaulted ceiling, its ribs and barreling webbed in shadows. Stone gargoyles with distorted lips and bulging eyes leer down from columns and pedestals. They are faces of idiots and fools the stone carvers remembered from the back alleys of their villages. I feel like them, stupid, dumb. But it's not nice to stare. I avert my eyes, then move my gaze to the gigantic altar. I blink dizzily at the golden chalices and ornate boxes.

It comes to me that a great cloud of witnesses really does surround us in this cathedral, spirits of generations. By kneeling here, I can see where they wore down the stone floor. The tall altar candles flicker. Fire endures while the candle gets used up. The spirit is more enduring than the body; that's what the candle says. Oh, images and their poignancy! We sail together, the living and the dead, as if nestled together in a massive ship.

As this congregation of strangers stands and steers through the French liturgy, I think about my mother lying alone in a funeral parlor. Or rather, not my mother, but my mother's body, her arthritic, knobby hands, her mouth, her forehead. They've laid out her body in the room where my stepfather was displayed years ago beside Chippendale chairs with striped mulberry and mustard upholstery. The sideboard. The wallpaper. Those funeral directors wanted their parlor to look as much like a living room as possible.

In my daze, I'm jarred by the sound of French droning through the Dallas funeral parlor. Then I recall that we're in a church in Paris. Translating the French, I catch snatches of meaning. We lift our hearts up to God. It is meet and right for us so to do.

My mother's spirit left her body fewer than twelve hours earlier. I think with some panic that I'd better consider what that means, while the rupture is still fresh. It feels like being at the scene of a car accident, needing to write down the details. I wonder whether her spirit is floating between earth and heaven. Such airy existence is new to her. I wonder whether she feels out of place. I wonder whether she is trying to make herself understood to other spirits, trying to make friends on this first day after her death.

And I wonder how my husband knew when my mother's spirit departed her body. What made him wake up soon after she died? He loved her, of course—or rather, not of course, because most sons-in-law and mothers-in-law do not love one another. Did she wake him? I wonder again.

But how?

The priest stirs, begins moving his hands, raising the chalice. He's far away, in heavy robes, looking like a magician. At some primitive level, I feel that my mother cannot be dead, because, very simply, she gave me life. My life poured into her and then my body tumbled out into the world. How can I still exist, when the person who caused my existence has died? I hold one hand out and stare at it. I see its familiar jade ring.

My fingers tremble slightly. I fear that I am not doing well, that we have decisions to make, that I cannot afford to fall apart, that I need to do whatever people mean when they say they are pulling themselves together.

When the mass of people rise to their feet and sing "Holy God, We Praise Thy Name," I try to recall the English words: Holy God, we praise Thy Name; Lord of all, we bow before Thee! All on earth Thy scepter claim, All in Heaven above adore Thee. As the priest begins his homily, the cathedral brightens the way the sky opens when a cloud passes from the sun.

In that moment I sense my mother. I feel a little frightened and improbably buoyant. I don't know why her spirit has come back, or how. I just know that I am in a French Catholic church the day after mother died, and her presence, like light, falls across me through one of the cathedral windows. It strikes me as odd that she's here, funny, really, because she was such an anti-Papist. And as the child of German immigrants, she held no truck with the French. But even in the later stages of Alzheimer's she had a sense of humor.

The following day, when I speak with the administrator at my university, she offers me the condolences of the whole staff. They'll be thinking about me, she says. She tells me I should do whatever I need to do. But no, unfortunately, each Study Abroad Program is unique, and there's no one to take over my program. If I leave Europe, my students' program may be over.

"Will they get credit?" I ask her.

"We'll have to figure that out," she tells me.

"They've worked hard all month."

She doesn't reply.

Two days later the students and I climb to our classroom on the fourth floor of our Russell Square walkup, where I meet the Study Abroad students for classes, our feet shuffling on the carpeted steps. The room smells stuffy. I sit on the desk at the front. The students peel off their coats and drop into the chairs. A radiator crackles. In the eaves just outside the windows, birds chirp frugally.

My students' faces glow with the adventure of their recent travels to Rome and Edinburgh and Dublin, where they have gone during the five day break that my husband and I spent in Paris. They laugh and call to one another. They pass around pictures on their cell phones and laptops. They tell jokes and exchange souvenirs. As a group, we've gotten close. Right now we would do anything for each other.

I watch them numbly. I have no idea what I will tell them. In thirty years of teaching, I've never felt so dimwitted in a classroom.

Eventually the students notice me. Quiet descends on them gradually, and they settle down slowly the way a bedsheet, after being snapped, flutters to the floor. Several of them turn their faces toward me, a bunch of sunflowers swiveling toward light. In that moment I cannot conceive of how to explain that their London Study Abroad program is over, that they waited tables for two summers to earn money for the trip that now may go down the drain, that they will have to fly home immediately, and they may not get credit.

I know perfectly well that I have the right to leave. It's my mother, after all. But if I do, I can't imagine what would happen to these children who have been put in my charge. And besides, I think my mother would want—no, that my mother does, actually, right now—want me to stay. Didn't she always tell us to finish what we start? If I could ask her and she could answer, she would tell me she doesn't need me in Dallas. She's gone to a better place. She's with my father. Those are the exact words she would use.

So I don't leave my students. The students never learn that my mother has died. On Wednesday morning, my mother is quietly buried in Dallas while I am teaching a class in London.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Geography of Memory by Jeanne Murray Walker. Copyright © 2013 Jeanne Murray Walker. Excerpted by permission of Center Street.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Preface xvii

Acknowledgments xxi

1 The Phone Call 1

2 The Choice 6

3 The Roiling Heavens 12

4 Foreboding 18

Field Note 1 Adages 27

5 My Phantom Mother 29

6 Falling 34

7 Safe 36

8 It's Igor Stravinsky 40

9 One Red Cent 45

10 Oh Bonnie, Oh Rayette 50

Field Note 2 What Is Memory 56

11 How We'll Help Her 57

12 Accounting 63

Field Note 3 Doing Research 68

13 Naomi and Ruth 69

14 The Bewitching 78

15 Homesick 87

Field Note 4 Paying Attention 100

16 Subversion 102

17 The Fanning of a Peacock's Tail 105

Field Note 5 The Human Brain 113

18 Learning Subversion 114

19 The Archangel Gabriel 123

20 The Reading Wars 130

21 Remnant 146

22 Kinhaven 149

23 Michael 157

Field Note 6 Memorising Music 171

24 Lloyd 173

25 Moving Mother 181

26 Graven Images 192

Field Note 7 Remembering Past Selves 206

27 Last Kinhaven 207

28 A Change of Heart 213

Field Note 8 Memorizing a Script 217

29 The Divide 219

30 Search for a Seminary Wife 223

31 Siblings at War 233

Field Note 9 Making a List 240

32 Nailing the Walls to the Foundation of the Universe 242

33 The Choice 250

34 Crisis 253

35 Changing Places 259

Field Note 10 Acrostics 271

36 Finding Company 272

37 Friendship 283

Field Note 11 Cultural Memory 296

38 Downhill Slide 298

39 The Gentleman Caller 305

Field Note 12 The Art of Memory 313

40 Alzheimer's Unit 315

41 A Play with a Happy Ending 323

42 A Million Countries to See 327

Field Note 13 Is Memory Essential? 339

43 The White Room 340

44 Learning to See 347

45 The Good Scab 349

46 To Celebrate Her Homegoing 355

Field Note 14 Ashes as a Memory Device 358

47 Reunion 359

Editorial Reviews

"Alzheimer's and death of a parent is a journey that others have told us about but few with such penetration and humane wisdom as Jeanne Walker's. Her story is a map of memory with mythical overtones, by which I mean that while its shape is recognizable, its details are utterly unique. I read it, mesmerized, wondering my way through this deeply moving portrait of a mother, a daughter, a family. Against expectation we are invited to join their hilarious, daunting dance: a boogie of decline whose haunting music persists."—Luci Shaw, poet, author of The Crime of Living Cautiously and What the Light Was Like, writer in residence at Regent College

"With THE GEOGRAPHY OF MEMORY, Jeanne Murray Walker, a master wordsmith, takes us on a journey-dare I say sacred pilgrimage-into the inner world of Alzheimer's. While Walker does not flinch from the calamities and sorrows of this journey, she also provides us with fresh glimpses into hidden joys and startling surprises along the way. I commend THE GEOGRAPHY OF MEMORY to you."—Richard J. Foster, author of Celebration of Discipline and Sanctuary of the Soul

"In a kind of family alchemy, a mother's failing memory somehow excites the synapses of her daughter's. The result is a child-adult memoir of grace, poignancy, and rich compassion."—Philip Yancey, bestselling author


"As the lively, witty, energetic character who was her mother begins to become hopelessly lost in Alzheimer's, poet Jeanne Walker readily shoulders her share of caregiving, a commitment of love requiring three-hour plane rides: disrupting the rhythms of her own life as a wife, mother, and professor, disquieting her with grief, and taxing her relationship with her beloved sister almost to the breaking point.

Yet the narrative as a whole says much more. At some point, knowing so well the story of her mother's life, Walker begins to find her crazy communications intelligible-realizing that her mother is talking in metaphors and understanding them. The farther away her mother wanders, the closer their relationship. The love between them strengthens. Trying to follow the details of her mother's life as she recalls them, now, in fragments, Walker finds to her surprise that she is not only recovering her own childhood memories but also understanding them in a new way-a set of insights ranking among the most precious of her life.

In plainsong prose evoking her heartland roots, Jeanne Walker locates the gifts to be found in the darkest days of a loved one's decline and death, a story of redemption that will inform and encourage anyone caring or expecting to care for ill and aging parents-or anyone at all."—Peggy Anderson, author of New York Times bestsellers Nurse and Children's Hospital

"Alzheimer's is a word that strikes terror in most of us, particularly as we and our parents age. Poet Jeanne Murray Walker's memoir of her pilgrimage in her mother's illness and death doesn't gloss the difficulties, but it removes the terror. What remains is a sturdy witness to unexpected meanings and beauties and even humor that surface in lives of faith and suffering. A friend once told me 'Anything can be endured if you make a story of it.' This magnificently written story is the latest evidence."—Eugene H. Peterson, professor Emeritus of Spiritual Theology Regent College, Vancouver B.C.

"Jeanne Murray Walker's story of a mother with Alzheimer's, like reports from other recent conflicts, is disorienting. How could it be otherwise? There are no "front lines," no clear distinctions between friends and enemies. How did this war even get started? How will it end-and what would "victory" look like? Maybe, she suggests, we need to see this disease with fresh eyes. "As I spent thousands of hours with her," Walker says of her mother, "I began to recover my own past." There's nothing syrupy about this book, but it's full of joy as well as sorrow. What a gift she has given us."—John Wilson, editor, Books & Culture

"Jeanne Murray Walker has written one of the most elegant, tender, and intelligent memoirs of Alzheimer's I have read. At once heart-wrenching and richly rewarding, intimate and objective, coldly cutting, and full of clear-eyed promise, THE GEOGRAPHY OF MEMORY is a beautiful gathering of moments: an artful mosaic of shards that build to a portrait of faith and hope and love."—Bret Lott, author of Letters and Life: On Being a Writer, On Being a Christian and Jewel

"In describing her mother's long passage into dementia and its reverberations through a family, Jeanne Murray Walker has given us a powerful tale of loss but also renewal, pain but also love. In simple yet beautiful language, she shows how the light of hope and grace can illuminate even the darkest journey. For many, many readers THE GEOGRAPHY OF MEMORY will be a treasure."—Alan Jacobs, author of The Narnian

"Those of us who've accompanied a beloved parent through the valley of the shadow will instantly recognize the terrain in this lyrical and profoundly wise account of aging unto death. Jeanne Murray Walker's THE GEOGRAPHY OF MEMORY is, hands down, one of the most beautiful books I've ever read."—Paula Huston, author of Simplifying the Soul and A Season of Mystery

"This book is not about "silver linings," though the author believes "the news about Alzheimer's is more hopeful than what we hear on the street." Fully acknowledging the anxieties, frustrations, bewilderment, and tensions that arise in caring for a parent with dementia, Jeanne Murray Walker manages to lead us through those rocky passages to a place not only of acceptance but of fascination and gratitude for the way that such caregiving brings her to new terms with her own memories, with the legacy of stories that are now hers to tell, and with shifting roles that offer rigorous lessons in humility and compassion. The way her own stories mingle with her mother's mirrors a striking truth about how what we call our own life stories are composites, our materials recycled, and everything we call "ours," a gift from those who continue to shape us even as they take their leave."—Marilyn McEntyre, author of Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies

"If you believe there is only darkness and loss in caring for a parent with Alzheimer's, you clearly haven't read Jeanne Murray Walker's book, which sets us straight. This page-turning memoir, fastidious in detail, delivers surprise and wit on nearly every page, teaching us about the immutability and transcendence of human personality, worth, and love. I needed this book."—Leslie Leyland Fields, author of Surviving the Island of Grace: A Life on the Wild Edge of America

"This deeply humane memoir is at once a memorial to a mother whose memory failed before her body gave way, a poignant reflection on the sister who lived close by while the author flew in repeatedly from afar, and an insightful exposition on memory itself. With a poet's eye for the apt image, THE GEOGRAPHY OF MEMORY is also a case book of spiritual disciplines taught by what Jeanne Murray calls "the ugly twins, aging and death."—Mark Noll, Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History, Notre Dame and author of American Evangelical Christianity: An Introduction

"A beautifully written memoir of a daughter's journey with her mother over the changeful, perilous landscape of Alzheimer's. The author's compassion, humanity, and humor shine through a chaotic, if not amazing, kaleidoscope of family plans, places, and emotions. What powerfully winds through the narrative is a poet's wonderful reflections on her own history and the nature of memory, identity, and self. A dazzling, engaging story of the grace of holding on and letting go."—Dr. Myrna Grant, faculty emerita, Wheaton College, Illinois

"There is so much more to this book than the subtitle indicates. Yes, it is a pilgrimage through the Alzheimer's that befell Walker's mother, told with unflinching yet compassionate honesty, and invaluable for any reader wrestling with a loved one's parallel journey. But the telling of the story involves the connections between mother and daughter, and both with family. It evokes reflections on memory, the nature of the human person, and love itself, that should endlessly engage your soul. It is one of the best memoirs you will ever read, period. A masterpiece."—Warren Farha, owner of Eighth Day Books, Wichita, KS

"Jeanne Murray Walker's loving account of caring for her Alzheimer's-stricken mother is also the occasion for the author to reflect on her own memories of growing up as a fundamentalist. She engagingly relates her own journey in leaving that heritage even while remaining a Christian and also intensely loyal to her memorable fundamentalist mother."—George Marsden, author of Fundamentalism and American Culture

"Jeanne Murray Walker elegantly affirms the value of memory while mourning its loss in her mother's life. She untangles complex threads of family, illness, and faith in a way that sheds light on the aging and dying process-much needed in our death-phobic culture."—Hannah Faith Notess, editor of Jesus Girls: True Tales of Growing up Female and Evangelical

"Walker offers an irresistibly candid account of her mother's slide into dementia and the challenges of helping her in her final days. As her fragmented memory becomes a mosaic of the family's history, her children are forced to confront issues from the past as well as crises in the present. Walker, a poet, creates a rich texture of remembered physical detail that not only lends beauty to the narrative but anchors events and emotions in the reader's memory even as they were anchored in her own."—Stephanie Kraft, journalist and author of No Castles on Main Street

"THE GEOGRAPHY OF MEMORY is as brave and poignant a tale of a mother's passage into Alzheimer's as you are likely to find. But what truly sets it apart is the way it triumphantly disproves our worst fear about this disease: that it robs its victims of their humanity. Like one of Shakespeare's late tragi-comedies, this book moves through loss and discord to discover, by the end, wellsprings of unexpected grace and reconciliation."—Gregory Wolfe, editor of Image magazine

"A moving honest, and often surprisingly hopeful account of a writer and her sister accompanying their mother as she experiences dementia."—Sojourners Magazine

"When I opened The Geography of Memory by Jeanne Murray Walker, I expected beautiful writing.... What I wasn't prepared for was how much in the book is hopeful, loving, how much, in the end, is balanced, is gained."—The Philadelphia Inquirer

"Walker's book stands out for several reasons. For one, the writing is superb. ... This isn't just a tale about an elderly parent or a frazzled caregiver. It is also, and equally, a coming-of-age story, and Walker's deft juxtaposition of her own story with her mother's is its genius."—Christian Century

From the Publisher

"Walker's book stands out for several reasons. For one, the writing is superb. ... This isn't just a tale about an elderly parent or a frazzled caregiver. It is also, and equally, a coming-of-age story, and Walker's deft juxtaposition of her own story with her mother's is its genius."

Christian Century

"When I opened The Geography of Memory by Jeanne Murray Walker, I expected beautiful writing.... What I wasn't prepared for was how much in the book is hopeful, loving, how much, in the end, is balanced, is gained."

The Philadelphia Inquirer

"A moving honest, and often surprisingly hopeful account of a writer and her sister accompanying their mother as she experiences dementia."

Sojourners Magazine

"THE GEOGRAPHY OF MEMORY is as brave and poignant a tale of a mother's passage into Alzheimer's as you are likely to find. But what truly sets it apart is the way it triumphantly disproves our worst fear about this disease: that it robs its victims of their humanity. Like one of Shakespeare's late tragi-comedies, this book moves through loss and discord to discover, by the end, wellsprings of unexpected grace and reconciliation."

Gregory Wolfe

"Walker offers an irresistibly candid account of her mother's slide into dementia and the challenges of helping her in her final days. As her fragmented memory becomes a mosaic of the family's history, her children are forced to confront issues from the past as well as crises in the present. Walker, a poet, creates a rich texture of remembered physical detail that not only lends beauty to the narrative but anchors events and emotions in the reader's memory even as they were anchored in her own."

Stephanie Kraft

"Jeanne Murray Walker elegantly affirms the value of memory while mourning its loss in her mother's life. She untangles complex threads of family, illness, and faith in a way that sheds light on the aging and dying process-much needed in our death-phobic culture."

Hannah Faith Notess

"Jeanne Murray Walker's loving account of caring for her Alzheimer's-stricken mother is also the occasion for the author to reflect on her own memories of growing up as a fundamentalist. She engagingly relates her own journey in leaving that heritage even while remaining a Christian and also intensely loyal to her memorable fundamentalist mother."

George Marsden

"There is so much more to this book than the subtitle indicates. Yes, it is a pilgrimage through the Alzheimer's that befell Walker's mother, told with unflinching yet compassionate honesty, and invaluable for any reader wrestling with a loved one's parallel journey. But the telling of the story involves the connections between mother and daughter, and both with family. It evokes reflections on memory, the nature of the human person, and love itself, that should endlessly engage your soul. It is one of the best memoirs you will ever read, period. A masterpiece."

Warren Farha

"A beautifully written memoir of a daughter's journey with her mother over the changeful, perilous landscape of Alzheimer's. The author's compassion, humanity, and humor shine through a chaotic, if not amazing, kaleidoscope of family plans, places, and emotions. What powerfully winds through the narrative is a poet's wonderful reflections on her own history and the nature of memory, identity, and self. A dazzling, engaging story of the grace of holding on and letting go."

Dr. Myrna Grant

"This deeply humane memoir is at once a memorial to a mother whose memory failed before her body gave way, a poignant reflection on the sister who lived close by while the author flew in repeatedly from afar, and an insightful exposition on memory itself. With a poet's eye for the apt image, THE GEOGRAPHY OF MEMORY is also a case book of spiritual disciplines taught by what Jeanne Murray calls "the ugly twins, aging and death."

Mark Noll

"If you believe there is only darkness and loss in caring for a parent with Alzheimer's, you clearly haven't read Jeanne Murray Walker's book, which sets us straight. This page-turning memoir, fastidious in detail, delivers surprise and wit on nearly every page, teaching us about the immutability and transcendence of human personality, worth, and love. I needed this book."

Leslie Leyland Fields

"This book is not about "silver linings," though the author believes "the news about Alzheimer's is more hopeful than what we hear on the street." Fully acknowledging the anxieties, frustrations, bewilderment, and tensions that arise in caring for a parent with dementia, Jeanne Murray Walker manages to lead us through those rocky passages to a place not only of acceptance but of fascination and gratitude for the way that such caregiving brings her to new terms with her own memories, with the legacy of stories that are now hers to tell, and with shifting roles that offer rigorous lessons in humility and compassion. The way her own stories mingle with her mother's mirrors a striking truth about how what we call our own life stories are composites, our materials recycled, and everything we call "ours," a gift from those who continue to shape us even as they take their leave."

Marilyn McEntyre

"Those of us who've accompanied a beloved parent through the valley of the shadow will instantly recognize the terrain in this lyrical and profoundly wise account of aging unto death. Jeanne Murray Walker's THE GEOGRAPHY OF MEMORY is, hands down, one of the most beautiful books I've ever read."

Paula Huston

"In describing her mother's long passage into dementia and its reverberations through a family, Jeanne Murray Walker has given us a powerful tale of loss but also renewal, pain but also love. In simple yet beautiful language, she shows how the light of hope and grace can illuminate even the darkest journey. For many, many readers THE GEOGRAPHY OF MEMORY will be a treasure."

Alan Jacobs

"Jeanne Murray Walker has written one of the most elegant, tender, and intelligent memoirs of Alzheimer's I have read. At once heart-wrenching and richly rewarding, intimate and objective, coldly cutting, and full of clear-eyed promise, THE GEOGRAPHY OF MEMORY is a beautiful gathering of moments: an artful mosaic of shards that build to a portrait of faith and hope and love."

Bret Lott

"Jeanne Murray Walker's story of a mother with Alzheimer's, like reports from other recent conflicts, is disorienting. How could it be otherwise? There are no "front lines," no clear distinctions between friends and enemies. How did this war even get started? How will it end-and what would "victory" look like? Maybe, she suggests, we need to see this disease with fresh eyes. "As I spent thousands of hours with her," Walker says of her mother, "I began to recover my own past." There's nothing syrupy about this book, but it's full of joy as well as sorrow. What a gift she has given us."

John Wilson

"Alzheimer's is a word that strikes terror in most of us, particularly as we and our parents age. Poet Jeanne Murray Walker's memoir of her pilgrimage in her mother's illness and death doesn't gloss the difficulties, but it removes the terror. What remains is a sturdy witness to unexpected meanings and beauties and even humor that surface in lives of faith and suffering. A friend once told me 'Anything can be endured if you make a story of it.' This magnificently written story is the latest evidence."

Eugene H. Peterson

"As the lively, witty, energetic character who was her mother begins to become hopelessly lost in Alzheimer's, poet Jeanne Walker readily shoulders her share of caregiving, a commitment of love requiring three-hour plane rides: disrupting the rhythms of her own life as a wife, mother, and professor, disquieting her with grief, and taxing her relationship with her beloved sister almost to the breaking point.

Yet the narrative as a whole says much more. At some point, knowing so well the story of her mother's life, Walker begins to find her crazy communications intelligible-realizing that her mother is talking in metaphors and understanding them. The farther away her mother wanders, the closer their relationship. The love between them strengthens. Trying to follow the details of her mother's life as she recalls them, now, in fragments, Walker finds to her surprise that she is not only recovering her own childhood memories but also understanding them in a new way-a set of insights ranking among the most precious of her life.

In plainsong prose evoking her heartland roots, Jeanne Walker locates the gifts to be found in the darkest days of a loved one's decline and death, a story of redemption that will inform and encourage anyone caring or expecting to care for ill and aging parents-or anyone at all."

Peggy Anderson

"In a kind of family alchemy, a mother's failing memory somehow excites the synapses of her daughter's. The result is a child-adult memoir of grace, poignancy, and rich compassion."

Philip Yancey

"With THE GEOGRAPHY OF MEMORY, Jeanne Murray Walker, a master wordsmith, takes us on a journey-dare I say sacred pilgrimage-into the inner world of Alzheimer's. While Walker does not flinch from the calamities and sorrows of this journey, she also provides us with fresh glimpses into hidden joys and startling surprises along the way. I commend THE GEOGRAPHY OF MEMORY to you."

Richard J. Foster

"Alzheimer's and death of a parent is a journey that others have told us about but few with such penetration and humane wisdom as Jeanne Walker's. Her story is a map of memory with mythical overtones, by which I mean that while its shape is recognizable, its details are utterly unique. I read it, mesmerized, wondering my way through this deeply moving portrait of a mother, a daughter, a family. Against expectation we are invited to join their hilarious, daunting dance: a boogie of decline whose haunting music persists."

Luci Shaw