Lauren Kessler didn’t handle her mother’s dementia very well. Haunted by how things might have been, the writer applied for a job as a care assistant in a nursing home near her home in Oregon. Dancing with Rose: finding life in the land of alzheimer’s is the chronicle of her experiences and deepening understanding of how she went wrong with her own mother.
There are some lovely moments in the book. Slowly, Kessler invites you to see patterns of residents, of staff, of the place itself. By book’s end, when she takes us to the memorial services of some of the residents, we know them deeply and can feel the loss along with staff and family.
Kessler manages to go deep into the sorrow and loss – as a daughter and as someone doing the back breaking work of caring for 8 people with dementia at a time and getting minimum wage. And yet she also puts words to the peace of deep human connection, with residents and fellow staff, that seems to addict her to the job that she intended to quit after three months. She stayed for 6.
from page 224:
“Of course, the human animal in the absence of all these civilizing conditions may not be all that pleasant. And family members accustomed to the pre-disease person who revealed only what he or she wanted to reveal, whose ego was fully in charge of the show, might very well find the new person difficult, distressing, even heartbreaking. I know I did. But there’s one thing about the folks at Maplewood, about people with Alzheimer’s in general: they are real, even the ones like Frances M. and Marianne, who are seriously deluded. They don’t have ulterior motives. They don’t manipulate. They don’t play games. They just are. “
Thank you so much for the kind words about my book.
It seems to me that Dancing with Rose is about personal redemption gained by stepping outside one’s comfort zone and entering into the experience of others who are deeply forgetful. How does one enter into the world of AD and avoid burnout? Caregivers are engaged in profoundly spiritual work yet too often they lack the language and social support to frame their experience in spiritual terms. Lauren Kessler touches on the spiritual aspects of caregiving and Alzheimer’s without being religious. This book is good for the soul.
I read this book shortly after I read Nickled and Dimed, another example of immersion journalism. That book’s bleak picture of what happens when paid caregivers are not given social, financial and spiritual support is a bitter antidote to Lauren Kessler’s prescription.