A life lost, but remembered

Sue Miller, who has written many wonderful novels, has written an interesting, terrifying, and deeply heart-felt memoir about her father’s descent into Alzheimer’s disease, and her experience in trying to care for him and understand the meaning of his life and illness. The Story of My Father succeeds at a number of levels. First, as anyone who has read Miller’s fiction would expect, this memoir is beautifully written – clear, insightful, and compelling. Second, it provides a fascinating and revelatory picture of AD, a disease that induces a varying and unpredictable range of inexorably worsening symptoms. After her father’s death, Miller (with the help of an assistant) probed into the science of AD and what research tells us about the nature of the disease. In this passage, she describes some of what she learned:

“…the threshold for its appearance symptomatically may vary with different histories, different brains, different lives, different ages. But when enough of the neurons that compose the critical pathways slow down in their activity, shrink, or die, then even the person with the most elegant brow, with the highest level of education, with the most acetylcholine zinging around in his brain experiences changes in his behavior. And in these changes in behavior, the amazing specificity of the parts of the brain reveals itself.

“My father never lost the ability to recall the names of those who had been important to him or to remember is some essential way who they were… he had trouble, though with new names…

“Why should that have been? It happened because the part of his brain whose function was to transfer new information into memory, the hippocampus, was being destroyed by Alzheimer’s disease. New names, new skills – how to open the door on my car, for instance, or how to work the remote controls for the television – these couldn’t be retained for more than a few days because they couldn’t get past the hippocampus into permanent “storage” in other parts of the brain.”

Another level on which this book succeeds so admirably is in providing a picture of James Nichols (Miller’s father) as he was before the disease, and how he retained some of his essential qualities even as the disease robbed him of most of his faculties.

Finally, the book gives an unsparing view of Miller (the daughter and the writer) as she struggles to deal with her father’s illness.

“When I write fiction I rearrange memory, I invent memory in order to make narrative sense of it for a reader and for myself, to explain why it’s important – exactly how it was. If I have a call, I suppose it is that: to try to make meaning, to embody meaning, in the narrative arrangement of altered and invented bits of memory. To be compelled to do this, actually.

“But in this case, in this book, I have to work differently. I have to rely purely on what happened as I remember it, and somehow to make narrative sense of that. This is harder. And it begs the question, Does life make narrative sense?…”

In an afterword to the book, Miller goes into greater detail about the experience of writing memoir as opposed to fiction. During her father’s illness, she had no intention of writing the book, but found (not surprisingly to me) that writing about the experience allowed her to process her grief and guilt more fully and more importantly, to understand and appreciate her father’s life and the relationship they shared.

Man is Wolf to Man

Janusz Bardach was just 21 years old when he was drafted from his hometown in Poland into the Red Army. As a Jew, he was eager to fight the Nazis, but only a year later he became a prisoner of the Stalinist regime after accidentally rolling his tank. He was forced to dig a grave and sleep in it before he was sentenced to death; but was rescued by a NKVD officer (NKVD was the precursor to the KGB), who saw to it that his sentence was converted to 10 years at hard labor. Over the next four years, Bardach was sent to first one camp and then another, enduring near starvation, torture, illness, and backbreaking labor. In the book, Man is Wolf to Man: Surviving the Gulag, which he co-wrote with Kathleen Gleeson, he recounts in excruciating detail the hardships he survived.

Despite the grisly circumstances of his imprisonment and the horrible treatment he received from some of the other prisoners and guards, Bardach finds beauty in the desolate wilderness of Kolyma and friendship with a few fellow prisoners, which nurture his will to live. He finds that survival depends on shutting out thoughts of anything other than getting through each day.

“…The only way to fend off despair and depression was not to think. I learned to shut out everything, to escape into the safety of my own space. Thoughts crawled into my mind like serpents, but I learned to sever them with the thrust of a shovel or pickax. I broke time down into hours, so that I only had to exercise my will for short periods – from waking up until noon, from noon until the evening meal, from the evening roll call until bedtime. I forbade myself to think about the days ahead or about the length of my sentence. I nearly banished thoughts of home because it took only a moment of lost concentration to slow down, fall into a hole, irritate somebody, not make the norm. Only mechanical movements mattered: shoveling the earth, chopping up the permafrost, loading and unloading the wheelbarrow. Fighting, quarreling, hunger, and thoughts of suicide broke prisoners down, and I veered away from these hazards and kept up my steady, relentless course…”

He is also protected by a series of what I can only call “guardian angels” who recognize his humanity and goodness and go out of their way to shield him from the Stalinist regime. Using his limited knowledge of Latin and medical terminology, he convinces guards and prison doctors (who were prisoners themselves) that he had completed 3 years of medical school and is assigned duty in a hospital while he is recovering from injuries sustained in a horrible beating. It is here, in caring for dying patients, that he discovers his own humanity and the sensitivity that would in later years lead him to become a renowned physician. Alas, he himself nearly dies from tuberculosis, but this too becomes an experience from which he draws great compassion for patients.

The book is remarkable, not only for the unimaginable but true story it tells, but also for its relevance today. Under Stalin, dissent was unacceptable and treated in the harshest possible manner. People were arrested and tortured for the vaguest of offenses and often gave up false information implicating others in order to end their torture (a lesson so often repeated yet ignored by people who think torture is an effective way of gathering intelligence). But the greatest lesson is that our individual and collective survival depends on our ability to care for each other.

Along for the ride

My friends at work gave me a wonderful cookbook called Cooking From the Heart, which features stories and recipes contributed by 100 well-known chefs as a benefit for Share Our Strength, an anti-hunger organization. Two of my favorite things in one book: food and stories!

In the foreward to the book, Richard Russo (who wrote, among other great books, Empire Falls) wrote this: "Who has not had the experience of being enchanted by a bottle of wine only to discover, the very next time we order it, that it's not what we remember? What made the first bottle special, of course, was that you drank it in the company of good friends. Or your children were visiting. Or your wife, you realize, has never looked more beautiful than tonight. What you were tasting was the flavor of excitement, of intimacy, of sharing, of joy, of well-being, of love. The grapes were just along for the ride."

Reading that paragraph, and looking through the book quickly, reminded me of how much I cherish the wonderful meals we have had with good friends and family. Just last week we spent the evening talking and laughing over a meal of london broil (from Hendricks farm), served with a delicious salad with roasted garlic dressing, spiced pecans, and maytag blue cheese (which I substituted for gorgonzola); and a yummy potato gratin with caramelized onions, which I found in Sally Schneider's A New Way to Cook. We finished it off with one of our favorites, an upside down pear and gingerbread cake.

The food was good. The company was great!

Meanwhile, I've been reading three books without finishing any of them, so I'll catch up on them in the blog shortly.