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.