A memoir of her mother’s decline from Alzheimer’s disease
I visited my mother several times not long before she died from colon cancer in 2008. She had struggled long before that with dementia. About 16 months before she passed, I stopped to give her some seashells I had collected along the Oregon coast. She looked at me, eyes vacant, recognizing neither the shells nor me.
When I stopped to visit her later that winter, all I could get from her was a vacant stare. I went to a nearby park and watched geese dipping into thawed portions of a river before I returned to her later that day. Ever since, I have related winter geese with my mother’s final days.
When she passed, I found myself grasping for closure. The last time I saw her eyes open, I offered a prayer for her.
My own experience in dealing with my mother’s dementia would have been far easier had I first read L. Annette Binder’s moving memoir, “Child of Earth and Starry Heaven,” Binder’s account of what it was like dealing with her mother’s affliction with Alzheimer’s disease. 
Binder lives in New Hampshire with her family. Her book is scheduled for release April 11 this year.
Binder masterfully blends classical references to the disease with modern medical attempts to find a cure. Far more moving, though, are Binder’s emotions as she struggles to define her own role as her mother slips into Alzheimer’s oblivion.
“Every day she is receding, I try so hard to keep her with me for just a little longer, and yet I fear she wouldn’t want to be here like this. She needs help with every aspect of her daily life. She valued privacy and decorum more than anyone I know, and she has so little of either left.”
As Binder visits her -mother’s memory care unit, she sees what the disease is doing to others, people once talented and admired, fading into the dusk of Alzheimer’s cruel embrace.
Binder also observes her mother’s returning lucidity shortly before her passing, a phenomenon validated by scientific research, something I observed in my own mother as well.
“Doctors and caregivers have long noticed that patients with dementia and other brain disorders can experience moments of extreme and unexpected lucidity shortly before they die.”
“Child of Earth and Starry Heaven” should be mandatory reading for anyone working in a memory care unit. I would also highly recommend it for anyone with a family member afflicted with the disease.
Michael Tidemann writes from Estherville, Iowa. His Facebook page is Author Michael Tidemann.