Another Name for Madness

A relentlessly personal take on the author's mother and the Alzheimer's that comes over her when she's still in her fifties. Marion Roach and her sister Margaret, along with a raft of attendants (often in uniform, sometimes changing so often that "the weekend people came and went so fast that I had to ask their names each time I called"), look after their mother through the slow advent of early-onset Alzheimer's, at a time when the disease was far less known. The author's denial of her mother's decline sometimes seems extreme--but understandable, perhaps, given that this book was published in 1985. Of all the memoirs I've read about the disease, this is the earliest. The prose is lively, sometimes overheated, as in this description of how the author felt upon hearing some troubling news about her mother: "Knuckles to teeth; be rational; there's a reason. My mind went blank, wanting to defer, forget, cleanse, have it go away. Go away. But I had to do something. Panic. The dry heaves of the heart." Still, I welcomed Roach's honesty. It's the sine qua non of such a memoir, and I trust the author's self-portrait. She loved her mother, she made mistakes, she fell apart. At some point, as caregivers, most of us do the same. Roach writes from what seem like pioneer days of the disease--though it was only the early eighties. There was no Internet, she says, no information, "no listing in the telephone book, no entry in the encyclopedia". (In fact, Alzheimer's is described in my 1973 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but at no great length.) The emotional story is the one that lasts, that remains perfectly fresh. The author writes, "I found that people forced me and my sister to say the most devastating things in front of my mother, about her, to explain her behavior. People wanted an explanation, and at first I was unwilling to give it to them. The hell with them, I thought. She's suffering, I'm suffering. Margaret's suffering, let them suffer. Let her grab food off their plates. Let her ask what day it is and how long their husbands have been dead, over and over and over again. I dare them to get up and leave. I dare them to make a sound." That scene, those frustrations, will strike a chord with anyone who has coped in public with someone suffering from Alzheimer's. "Grief," as Marion Roach says, " is a mute sense of panic."

My husband found this book on an airplane and couldn't put it down. I am almost finished with it and, wiping back tears, strongly believe it should be required reading for a better understanding of Alzheimer's Disease and its impact on the family. Roach's writing style is very reader friendly.