[Paperback title is Family on Beartown Road, which confuses the heck out of people who think one is a sequel to the other…]
Cohen lives in Binghamton, our closest city, and writes a column for the paper. The column’s never struck me as anything special, so I wasn’t expecting much from this book. I read it both for local interest, and because the topic of Alzheimer’s fascinates me (I spent several years as a home health aide working with Alzheimer’s victims). House on Beartown Road surprised me–it’s got some flaws, but on balance it’s a terrific memoir.
Cohen moved to Binghamton & bought a big country farmhouse with her husband. They had a daughter and shortly thereafter her father, whose Alzheimer’s was rapidly worsening, moved in with them. Nine weeks later, the husband left. As the book opens, winter is coming on and Cohen is responsible for a one-year old, an elderly man who needs almost as much care, dogs, cats, and a drafty farmhouse. Pretty scary. The present-tense, straightforward narration gave me the claustrophic impression of being trapped, stuck, overwhelmed right along with Cohen. Many of the short chapters have clearly been reworked from newspaper columns, and there’s some repetion of the background, but that actually adds to the immediacy, the way the brain runs over and over an awful situation. Sometimes the journalistic style reveals sloppiness (reliance on cliches, egregious mistakes like “enormity” for “enormousness”), but there’s also plenty of compelling writing, and the brisk pacing works.
The situation is as hard as you would imagine (harder if you’ve never experienced a winter in this area!), but there’s humor and happiness too. Cohen herself isn’t that appealing as a character, primarily because through most of the book she’s in thrall to a deep depression. But her daughter and her dad are both captivating. Little Ava adopts everything.
I have to fight her over the stub ends of celery and carrots. She wants to take them back to her room, where she lines them up in rows on the wood floor and talks to them in baby gibberish. Then she tucks them in bed and bids them goodnight. They have names. They get sleepy and hungry. I find her trying to feed a piece of an old cookie to a chewed ear of corn she’s pilfered from the dinner table.
Sanford’s “word salad” (constructions people with Alzheimer’s come up with to work around words they’ve forgotten) are often poetic or funny. His love for Ava, even though he doesn’t really understand who she is and calls her “this little guy,” is heartwarming. Cohen understands the way the world seems to him and her intelligent sympathy (even when the practical and emotional problems drive her to the edge) help us feel how her dad is still a whole person. And despite all the difficulties, it’s wonderful how well the combination of a tiny child and someone with dementia works. Ava and Sanford understand and accept each other.
The brain of my father and the brain of my daughter have crossed. On their ways to opposite sides of life, they have made an X. They look upon each other with fond familiarity. And they see each other heading to the place they have just come from. On his way out of this life, Daddy has passed her the keys.
Instead of thinking about him losing the abilities to speak, to walk, and to negotiate the world, I like to think he has given them to her.