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Memoir

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A heart-felt memoir that could only be written by someone who has experienced this painful journey. My mother died of Alzheimer's and this book helped me with my healing. Thank you Sue Miller.

I read some of this and wept

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Parts of this memoir are very moving..I felt a tug in my heart for my father who is in the throws of Alzheimer's Disease.

A memoir worth remembering

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This is Sue Miller's first nonfiction book about her father, James Nichols, who started showing signs of Alzheimer's disease (AD) well before he was picked up by the police after getting lost while driving his car. That incident, however, proved to be the moment of truth for his family yet Miller explains the tendency to repeatedly deny the disease: "It came and went anyway, and so again and again I was able to argue myself out of acknowledging it." Instances of acceptance are described too as she notes, "I found out there were still things I could learn from him, still things he could teach me, things that helped bring him home in my memory from the faraway land of his disease." Miller describes her father's slow progression through the disease and the resulting transitions from home care to different levels of residential care. She has few compliments for professional caregivers, suggesting that staff and families alike did not know how to care for persons with dementia when her father was diagnosed in 1986.

Miller's sad and pleasant memories in the midst of his decline are placed within the context of her childhood and family of origin. She describes in detail many of the ways that her father's personality shaped her own way of thinking and her career as a writer. She recalls the cruel irony of watching her father, a church historian, wrestle with a disease that chipped away at his own history over a period of eight years. She does not write simply about his AD, for he had a fulfilling life before its onset. His life before and after the onset of his disease are examined as a whole. Miller does not wish to remember her father as a man rendered helpless. She tries to reclaim him as the loving parent he was for most of his long life. Isn't this what every caregiver hopes that others will also see in someone who has changed and lost so many abilities?

Miller passionately reflects on her own struggles that are universal concerns among caregivers. "[T]his is the hardest lesson... for a caregiver: you can never do enough to make a difference in the course of the disease," she writes. "We always find ourselves deficient in devotion.... Did you visit once a week? You might have visited twice. Oh, you visited daily? But perhaps he would have done better if you'd kept him at home. In the end all those judgments, those self-judgments, are pointless." Miller's desire to rescue her father from AD is impossible and in the end, she realizes that he did not need rescuing - his life of faith had prepared him for this experience. This moving memoir takes the reader on an intensely personal journey through a daughter's grief over a series of losses that are part and parcel of AD. Her observational skills and literary talent blend together into a poignant story about the special bond that is tested in the midst of caring for a parent.

Thorough Research Except For Hospice Service

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3/15/05 Sue Miller's ability to show her father's decline from calm and compassionate to defensive ,often combative[ less selflessness :except in the latter section in the book where his concern in his dillusion that children had died in a fire] which had been no more than a "late night" fire drill at the 'Sutton Hill' Retirement Community Center, is a tribute to her as a biographer and an autobiographer (She speaks in "the 1st person").However, Pgs 149-153 , with 1.her father(Professor James Nichols)'s physician estimate that he has only a couple of weeks or less to live, and 2. with the issue and authorization of "DNR"(Do Not Resuscitate) and 3. with the exit of his physician,(she came to see him no more,leaving the "dying to 'the Hospice Service' and the Nursing Homes'nursing services) ,4.the entrance of "the Hospice Service",5.the morphine injections(less injections than Miller wanted for him) to annihilate the pain which he was apparently experiencing",5.the schedules and manner of feeding food or liquids ,6. the rituals of reading (mostly scriptures) or hymn singing by Miller summarizes this "climax" in only 5 pages while elongating from the second half of Pg 153-171 ,a perspective of her retrospects and thoughts(which makes these ending pages(149-171),more a fine essay than a strong epilogue.

An excellent writer tackles a problem many of us share

Customer Rating:
Perhaps I am a bit jaded; my father-in-law is in the late stages of dementia, and over the years I have read many books written by relatives who watch over a loved one's decline into this disease.

What Sue Miller adds to this "genre" is the general excellence of her writing. (Miller is well-known as the author of novels such as "The Good Mother.") Thus, "The Story of My Father" rises above the sad story of her father's decline (a story whose outlines will be familiar to many of us) and gives us more, a touching portrait of the man her father was throughout his life.

I did not learn anything new about Alzheimer's from reading this book. But I think most of us read books like this not for the medical facts, but for the sense that we are not alone, that other people have been there, too. If that describes you well, you will find "The Story of My Father" a very sympathetic choice.