Enter Mourning: A Memoire on Death, Dementia, & Coming Home [Paperback]

I am studying death, dying and bereavement and found this book to be quite helpful in understanding what a family goes through when a loved one has dementia and becomes quite ill. The author is a talented and gifted writer who provides the reader with an inside look at a very personal, challenging and rewarding journey. I am grateful to have read this book!
Pierrette Raymond

Many books have been and are being published on the topic of mourning and grieving for a parent or spouse who is slowly slipping away towards death as a result of Alzheimer's or another form of dementia. Some books focus on self-help and practical guidance for caregivers, others offer explanations on the medical and neurological conditions and assist families and loved ones how to detect medical symptoms. Yet others share their personal experiences of that road less traveled as they accompany their family member (or close friend) and hope that their story can be of help and possibly comfort to others. Heather Menzies's chronicle of her own coming to terms with her mother's dementia is a very personal and complex story that reveals as much about her own struggles to cope with her busy life as about the need to constantly reassess her relationship with her mother and her four siblings.

Anybody who, like I, has lost her mother to dementia, will recognize the depiction of the emotional ups and downs that seem to be accompanying the early stages of the condition. At that stage is easier for the daughter (or son) to dismiss the symptoms and push into the future any realization that one or the other odd behaviour is, possibly, a first sign of the parent's mental deterioration. Reading this account, I found many parallels to my own experiences, not only as regards the period of slow decline but also in terms of reflecting back on the past relationship between daughter and mother. Menzies' mother, fiercely independent and self-sufficient following her husband's death many years earlier, did not make it easy to allow a more intimate approach: she appeared less than affectionate nor was she visibly loving towards her grown-up children. Over time, as caring for her mother became more and more involved - from personal care to feeding to just sitting together holding hands - Menzies also changed. She slowly opened up in ways that she had not anticipated and together mother and daughter could find moments of happiness and comfort. She describes these very movingly. Out of the blue, while rarely speaking a full sentence anymore, and for the first time that she can recall, her mother told her "I love you very much." As words lost meaning and were reduced to simple sounds, Menzies discovered that they had discovered a new way of communication between them that was "beyond words", yet that could touch them both at a much deeper level than words could have ever reached: touching, holding, looking closely at each other... keeping to the routine of drinking tea and watching the birds outside the window. I recall all of these phases from my own recent past, and more. Until her death, my mother reacted emotionally to music and it soothed her spirit in her last days of life.

It is difficult to gauge how helpful books like this one can be to readers going through the earlier or later stages of accompanying a parent with any form of dementia and caring for them. Living through these phases is always a highly personal and unique experience. It is a very long and slow good bye from a person one has known all one's life. I was able to appreciate and connect to all aspects of Menzies' chronicle that addressed the gradually more caring and loving relationship between daughter and mother. Also, Menzies refers to useful background reading and cites information especially helpful to her and she added a reading list. However, the extensive personal accounts of her own life, almost independently of being "the daughter", I found less engaging and rather distracting from the main messages. [Friederike Knabe]