Caring for Mother: A Daughter's Long Goodbye
Author: Virginia Stem Owens
Translator: Ja-hwa Yoo
Publisher: Bookie
482 pages | 210*148mm
| Important! Please read before you order! |
| >>>This book is written in Korean. |
About This Book
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Death is never timely: it comes either too soon or
too late. In
The Year of Magical
Thinking, Joan Didion recounts the aftermath of her husband's
sudden death at the dinner table. At the other edge of the spectrum,
Owens describes seven years preceding her mother's relentless descent
into dementia, "God's own breath slowly leaking out through the fissures
in her brain." Afflicted first with Parkinson's, then small strokes and
Alzheimer's disease, Mrs. Stem eventually required round-the-clock care.
Owens moved next door and spent hours every day with her: "All I could
do was squat beside the avalanche, listening for any sign of life;
sometimes I could hear a faint but familiar echo of her voice or gesture
from under the heap." Through essays as incisive and insightful as
Didion's, this account succeeds on multiple levels: medical detective
story, personal memoir, flawless description, philosophical and
spiritual exploration (where is the self when the brain no longer
functions normally?). Owens offers not self-help but hope as she bears
witness to the grief and glory of life's ending: "If love... weren't the
center from which life flows, if it didn't, as Dante says, move the
stars, how could we bear such weight?"
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