| Death in Slow Motion : A Memoir of a Daughter, Her Mother, and the Beast Called Alzheimer's | | |
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Product Description
When her once-glamorous and witty novelist-mother got Alzheimer's, Eleanor Cooney moved her from her beloved Connecticut home to California in order to care for her. In tense, searing prose, punctuated with the blackest of humor, Cooney documents the slow erosion of her mother's mind, the powerful bond the two shared, and her own descent into drink and despair. But the coping mechanism that finally serves this eloquent writer best is writing, the ability to bring to vivid life the memories her mother is losing. As her mother gropes in the gathering darkness for a grip on the world she once loved, succeeding only in conjuring sad fantasies of places and times with her late husband, Cooney revisits their true past. Death in Slow Motion becomes the mesmerizing story of Eleanor's actual childhood, straight out of the pages of John Cheever; the daring and vibrant mother she remembers; and a time that no longer exists for either of them.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 38
 Powerful, Incredibly Well-Written, Deeply Touching & Helpful March 12, 2010
Heather LaRee Carter (Central Coast, California)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Because dementia runs in my family, I intend to leave references and information for my sons. Thank you, Eleanor for sharing your incredible story with the world.
I have read the non-fiction books teaching about the black-and-white information on dementia/Alzheimer's. While researching for more "help" on Amazon, Cooney's memoir caught my eye. I gratefully read the excerpts offered online, quickly ordered it and quickly devoured it.
This is a true and gripping story -- nothing sugar-coated, which is exactly what I wanted and needed. In living REAL LIFE color, Cooney weaves her mother's past and her own throughout the memoir. I was thankful because... their lives are so much more than this one life chapter of Alzheimer's - plus, I was given some recovery time!
Eleanor Cooney shares with her reader, the unflattering but honest thoughts and feelings of a daughter with so much love, hopeful and positive intentions FOR her beloved mother. Innocently, she steps into a world for which she is unprepared and believing that love conquers all. Maybe it does for some, maybe it does eventually--this is real life and each of us will experience our own versions.
Reading this book, I felt seen, known and not alone. I also was given valuable and helpful guidance and information.
My heart and my kindness go out to Cooney and her loved ones. I thank her for bravely sharing her story. This disease will affect many of us in some way and a book such as this, offers us important insights and education. It also stretches our compassion for all who are on this path. I highly recommend it.
The Hip, Cool, Funny, Brilliant, Sane Mother July 15, 2009
John Thorndike (Athens, OH United States)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Eleanor Cooney's mother, Mary Durant, and my father, Joe Thorndike, worked together at American Heritage magazine in the seventies. No one could have imagined at the time that two such lively and intelligent people could lose their minds to Alzheimer's.
Cooney makes it clear from the start that she's not going to pull any punches. She takes her first Valium eight lines into the book, and we soon discover why: her mother is difficult, and taking care of her often a nightmare. Cooney's own life is constantly put on hold as she and her partner look after a forgetful and demanding old woman. They try to do the right thing, and often they do, according to their lights. (With Alzheimer's, who can ever say exactly what the right thing is?) But sacrifice is not an idle word. The author's mother, Mary Durant, though much loved, has irrevocably disrupted their lives.
"My mother was always my favorite person," Cooney writes. "And a lot of other people's, too. Hip, cool, brilliant, funny, sane."
No wonder the author wants to protect and look after her. But what a chore it is. There are Alzheimer's caregivers--and writers--who work hard to stay cheerful. Cooney works hard to stay honest, and there are plenty of times when the job of looking after her mother overwhelms her.
"No way," she writes, "am I going to diaper my mother. We all have our limits, and this, I'm afraid, is mine."
She might avoid diapering, but she can't avoid her mother's tantrums, her demands, her extreme confusion. This is a beautifully-written book, cogent and powerful, an explicit report from the front lines of of dementia care.
The shifting sands of Alzheimer's March 6, 2009
A House of Readers (Kentucky, USA)
This is a tremendously important book about one family's experience with the surreal and shifting landscape of Alzheimer's. Eleanor Cooney's story will break your heart, but also thoroughly celebrates the life of her exceptional mother, Mary Durant: a mother, writer, lover, and adventurer who manages to retain a spark of the dynamo she was up until the very last chapter.
Cooney's memoir takes a hard look at what it means to have Alzheimer's in "real world" America--with limited money, family caregivers, and no media attention or public support. Not surprisingly, there is much room for improvement. Addressing caregiver fatigue and providing affordable, quality long-term care placement for those with Alzheimer's needs to be be near the top of the list of our country's health care priorities. I would recommend this book for all medical and assistive personnel working with the elderly.
death in slow motion September 30, 2008
Carol Bakker (San Francisco, Ca)
While I have never directly gone through caring for a patient with alzheimer's disease, as a nurse I have cared for many such patients and had contact with their families. This account by the daughter of writer Mary Durant strips bare not only what the disease can do to a vibrant, intelligent person, but the effect it has on the psche of all family involved in the care of the alzheimer's victim. The journey begins with selfless determination and bravery, and soon has the caregivers directly involved reduced in a crazy-making world of desperation and guilt.
While this book can be devastating in its honesty it is not without humor, and the writing is nothing short of wondrous. Very few books have me reduced to tears at last turning of the page; this one did. These people will live on in your heart long after reading Death in Slow Motion.
Through a glass, darkly . . . November 2, 2007
Thomas J. Macentee (Chicago, IL)
but unlike the passage from 1 Corinthians, Eleanor Cooney's perception and view of Alzheimer's disease is clear, unmuddied and unlike any that I've ever read. As the disease clouds the memory and behavior of her mother, the range of emotions that I felt as a reader and witness were sometimes too much to bear.
This is a book that I first read when a condensed version appeared in a Harper's magazine article in 2001. I purchased the book shortly thereafter since my own mother had been diagnosed with the disease a year earlier at the age of 58.
I still pick up Death, in Slow Motion every few weeks. I can't tell you what a comfort it has been to me as I journey through the dark and twisted tunnel of care for my own mother. Although our circumstances are different, and the case of every Alzheimer's patient is truly unique, I felt and still feel as if I have met someone who is willing to hold up that mirror and tell me what I am in store for - but in a comforting, compassionate and very honest manner.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 38
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Tuesday, August 11, 2009 - 10 Posts
John Train's background story, IMO, is strange enough to defy description, which is perhaps, the reason it has not been presented...
presented in this kind of detail before:
Quote: http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=dev...1&scoring=a
Miss Alexandra Mills...
"Barb's" thjread has 7700 views now. Has anybody learned anything new from reading any of the posts on that thread? Pardon...
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