I have a tendency lately. My elderly parents (Mom is 93 and Dad is staggering his way toward 97) moved to my city to be closer to us as they aged. Which was entirely out of character. For decades they have lived pretty isolated lives; we were never big on celebrating holidays or milestones. No Sunday dinners, particularly. We would try to visit once or twice a year. For the last 25 years, they lived in the Yukon. In 2018, they moved to Saskatoon -- and I didn't realize the level of responsibility that arrived in the moving van with them. Elizabeth Hay's story about her own parents has startling similarities to my own experience, and I would often find myself jabbing my husband as we lay reading in bed at night: "Listen, let me read you this part! Doesn't this sound exactly the same!" It was reassuring that I was not the only daughter to experience this.
From Elizabeth Hay, one of Canada's beloved novelists, comes a startling and beautiful memoir about the drama of her parents' end, and the longer drama of being their daughter. Winner of the 2018 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonficiton.
Jean and Gordon Hay were a colourful, formidable pair. Jean, a late-blooming artist with a marvellous sense of humour, was superlatively frugal; nothing got wasted, not even maggoty soup. Gordon was a proud and ambitious schoolteacher with a terrifying temper, a deep streak of melancholy, and a devotion to flowers, cars, words, and his wife. As old age collides with…
I've said in another review that I'm showing a bit of a tendency with some of the books I'm choosing this year. The three I've chosen for The Shepherd are all about aging parents. They Left Us Everything has particular significance for me since the title is literal. The parents left their children to deal with a mammoth task: that of emptying a house with 23 rooms filled with STUFF. While my parents are still alive (Mom is 93 and Dad is closing in on 97) and they moved to my city to be closer to us "as we age," they too had a house in the Yukon stuffed with...stuff. It has been so with every house they've owned, but for each of their eight or nine moves prior to this last one, it was their task to do the move. Often, things were just abandoned in the houses they sold and left behind. But for this last big move--and the subsequent ones to assisted living for Mom and a care facility for Dad--was on us. Getting rid of stuff, as with comedy as our stand-up comic friend often says, "ain't so easy, is it?"
A warm, heartfelt memoir of family, loss, and a house jam-packed with decades of goods and memories.
After almost twenty years of caring for elderly parents—first for their senile father, and then for their cantankerous ninety-three-year old mother—author Plum Johnson and her three younger brothers have finally fallen to their middle-aged knees with conflicted feelings of grief and relief. Now they must empty and sell the beloved family home, twenty-three rooms bulging with history, antiques, and oxygen tanks. Plum thought: How tough will that be? I know how to buy garbage bags.
Again, I'm reading a few books lately that have to do with experiences in elderly parents, the role and responsibility of adult sons and daughters, and how to navigate the tricky and ever-changing tides of emotions. This book is funny, sad, a little frightening.
The adventure begins when Meg’s mother, Addie, vacationing in Florida, takes a spill. At the hospital, Addie bolts upright on her gurney and yells “I demand an autopsy!” before passing out cold.
“One minute, she is unconscious, the next, she’s nuts,” observes Meg Federico in this hilarious and poignant memoir of taking care of eighty-year-old Addie and her relatively new (and equally old) husband, Walter, in their not-so-golden years.
Addie’s accident is a portent of things to come over the next two years as Meg oversees her mother’s home care in the Departure Lounge, the nickname Meg gives Addie and…
Re-released in 2023 by Shadowpaw Press, this multi-award winning story continues to intrigue readers since its original publication in 2020. In the early 20th century, as homesteaders in Saskatchewan are scratching out hard new lives on the Canadian prairie, William, an adventurer from New Zealand, brings his new bride, Louise, to the freshly broken earth of his farm near Watrous.
Physical and emotional isolation take their toll on everyone struggling to survive in the harsh landscape, and when William and Louise’s second child, Violet, is born “feebleminded,” it plunges Louise—a woman burdened with a dark secret—back into a time of shame and regret, even as the child draws out goodness and loyalty from her neighbours, Hank and Emily.
Then tragedy upends the family, and William, while struggling to raise and protect his daughter and find his way to forgiveness, must come to terms with the fact that no one is infallible.
