The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 26 June 2024
by George Hodgman
Barring any unforseen accidents or illnesses, most of us will one day find ourselves caring for (or avoiding caring for) an aging parent in the most fragile and feeble parts of their lives, anticipating (sometimes hoping for) the very end. It is an experienxce fraught with the reversing relationships of care-giver and dependent. Memories of life past, the good and especially the bad, become significant markers of the day-to-day drudgery of coping with sickness, decay and often dementia and confusion. The experience can be profoundly stressful, taxing of personal resources both material and emotional. A big family of siblings can help, but even then, conflicts and relationships between care-givers can be rife with conflict. And, for a sole single care-giver, it can transform one's own life of independence to a profound responsibility, the kind one both wants to be able to provide, as well as to avoid at all costs. Not enough of our culture addresses the stresses of end-of-life care. We're taught not to think about it in our undending culture of consuming the ever-new. And the alternatives of professional care are expensive and shot through with corporate corruption, greed and neglect.
And so, the reader can be forgiven for imagining that a memoir of just such an experience would make for difficult reading. And this book is a challenge, but a rewarding and moving one. The author, an editor at a major New York magazine publisher, moves home to tiny Paris, Missouri to take care of his mother, over ninety years old and beginning to show signs of mental deterioration. The experience is gruelling. Hodgman loses his job. But he also finds it emotionally rewarding as he establishes a very different relationship with his mother than they had had before. A gay man, growing up in the 1960s and 70s, he didn't have access in Missouri to the liberated communities of the coastal cities. His parents, taciturn midwesterners clearly loved their son but never made much mention of his private life. The result in him was a very underdeveloped self-esteem, and a long life of romantic desperation and loneliness. Ultimately, this expressed itself in addiction and isolation. It is a very sad journey. Along the way he discovers the nature of his past relationships with his parents and how they made him who he became. Ultimately, as the reader expects the book to end in Betty's death, the outcome is gentle and quietly hopeful.
In the end, many of us will experience this as we get older with our aging parents. It is a sad and yet vital part of our lives and some of us would rather not face it, ever. How we relate to the experience says a lot about who we are. Maybe some of us will see what it all means to us. Maybe many of us won't.