Reverberations: A Daughter’s Meditations on Alzheimer’s

Reverberations: A Daughter’s Meditations on Alzheimer’s

Marion Agnew

Non-Fiction

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About the book

  • Shortlisted for the 2020 Louise de Kiriline Lawrence Award for Nonfiction
Most people think Alzheimer's Disease is the same as memory loss, if they think about it at all. But most people prefer to ignore it, hoping that if they ignore it hard enough, it will go away. That was certainly Marion Agnew's hope when her mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. Yet, with the diagnosis, Marion's world changed. Her mother — a Queen's and Harvard/Radcliffe-educated mathematician, a nuclear weapons researcher in Montreal during World War II, an award-winning professor and researcher for five decades, wife of a history professor, and mother of five — began drifting away from her. To keep hold of her, to remember her, Marion began paying attention, and began writing what she saw. She wrote as her mother became suspicious on outings, as she lost even the simplest of words, as she hallucinated, as she became frightened and agitated. But after her mother's death, Marion wanted to honour the time of her mother's life in which she had the disease, but she didn't want the illness to dominate the relationship she'd had with her mother. This moving memoir looks at grief and family, at love and music. It is a coming-to-terms reflection on the endurance of love and family.

About the author

Agnew, Marion

Marion Agnew’s essays and short fiction have appeared in numerous magazines and literary journals, including The Malahat Review, The New Quarterly, Atticus Review, The Walleye, The Grief Diaries, and Full Grown People, as well as in the anthologies Best Canadian Essays 2012 and 2014. She has been shortlisted for the Prairie Fire contest as well as for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Originally from Oklahoma, she realized her dream of becoming a Canadian citizen and moving to her family’s summer property in the Canadian Shield, where she had spent the most magical summers of her childhood.

Excerpt

The card showed a sprig of mistletoe tied with a red ribbon. Under the printed greeting inside, Mom had signed “Jeanne” instead of her usual “Mother,” and Dad had written “Come see us! Ted.” On the opposite page, Mom had written a note. As I read it, my stomach tightened.

I wish I had a time to visit together your during the avation. I enjoy very much some of the value evated as she sees us all. We enjoy very muh. I wish that all those precess that seem to have great help. Reap and the children are looking fast. Our children can “take forst” but we are working like greeting trying to see you again soon!

I winced. When did she get this bad? For ten months, since Mom’s diagnosis the previous February, I’d had a name for her forgetfulness and confusion, her lost and mangled words. Until then, my sister and I had simply called it “how she is,” as in “you know how she is.” But even after her diagnosis, I’d allowed “probable Alzheimer’s Disease” to remain an abstraction, separate from the woman who was my mother.

This Christmas card, shaking slightly in my hand, showed me her disease—right here, blue ink on white paper.

I sagged into a chair, blinking away tears to examine the card. She had really worked at this note, adding the word “your” to the first sentence: “I wish I had a time to visit together your during the avation.” Did it make sense to her then?

Reviews

“Marion Agnew didn’t want to write about her brilliant, often formidable, mother. Instead, she wanted to save her. But as it became clear that was impossible, she began to write, searching for ways to understand and accept her mother even…” >>

— Judy McFarlane Prairie Fire

“Marion Agnew's Reverberations is a welcome, insightful read. Alzheimer disease is one of the several later-life mental health challenges that has been on a steady increase in the past decades. Most of us likely know someone who has the illness or…” >>

— Michael Sobota The Chronicle-Journal

“Mother's decline challenges author
Alzheimer's disease and dementia have become fairly common topics in contemporary arts, with a variety of novels, memoirs and films that deal with these illnesses, which are affecting a growing number of people each year…” >>

— Andrea Geary Winnipeg Free Press

“Marion Agnew’s, REVERBERATIONS: A DAUGHTER’S MEDITATIONS ON ALZHEIMER’S—a collection of personal essays about Agnew’s mother’s dementia, her family, and how her parents’ lives still influence hers—was recently released by Winnipeg publisher Signature Editions. It includes “Entanglement,” which appeared in The…” >>

— Atticus Review

“Marion Agnew is the author of Reverberations: A Daughter’s Meditations on Alzheimer’s, a collection of creative nonfiction essays published by Signature Editions (2019) and shortlisted for the 2020 Louise de Kiriline Lawrence Award for Nonfiction. Marion’s writing has also appeared in The…” >>

— Suzannah Windsor Freeman Write It Sideways

“On a summer day in 1992, my mother told how, more than forty years earlier, my then-baby brother broke his leg. Then she told it again. She told the story four times in one hour, in fact.

…” >>

— Alz Authors

“CNCF member Marion Agnew is an editor and writer who lives and works in Shuniah, Ontario, just outside of Thunder Bay. Her new book Reverberations: A Daughter’s Meditations on Alzheimer’s has been praised for its honest and contemplative discussion of dementia. Recently…” >>

— Lesley Buxton Creative Nonfiction Collective

Video

Medical Mysteries, Personal Crises - Virtual Event

Three authors talk about how and why they’ve written about very personal medical issues — Marion Agnew on Alzheimer’s disease, Amy Boyes on premature birth, and Vanessa Farnsworth on Lyme disease.


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