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RELEASED TO THE ANGELS
Author: Garzione, Marilynn
Review Date: AUGUST 14, 2009
Publisher:iUniverse (188 pp.)
Price (hardback): $26.95
Price (paperback): $16.95
Publication Date: February 6, 2009
ISBN (hardback): 978-0-595-51338-3
ISBN (paperback): 978-0-595-50632-3
Category: AUTHORS
Classification: NONFICTION
The wayward yet inexorable progress of Alzheimer’s and the education of a caregiver and wife.
Garzione explains, regarding her husband Pat, “I needed him. I always have.” But when he developed Alzheimer’s, she had to be the steady and prepared one. Still, as the author writes, “You cannot approach this disease with a game plan…It makes its own rules.” So she learned to live a day at a time, marshalling her resources and coming to understand that one can’t control Alzheimer’s, but one can choose how to react to the disease. Amid all the pain, despair and exhaustion, she prizes the moments of humor and joy, assigning them as much power as the hard times, finding some measure of balance and an appreciation that “life is still going on.” Garzione’s pagelong entries are like flashes of Morse code—an instant or slice of her daily life in the world of Alzheimer’s. Readers observe the living theater of the disease—her husband serving her a frozen bagel, sharing music, a blessed midnight run to the market, Pat’s last attempt to write and the author’s realization that “[l]ove is going to cost…cost in time and in moments of pain and frustration.” These moments accrue, providing not so much wisdom—Garzione is too humble to make that claim, even if it may be laid—but appreciation of circumstance. She charts Pat’s dwindling, his grasping for words and getting lost, while delineating her role as caregiver—the “slow, gentle dance” as Pat follows her emotional lead. The constant erosion of his mental and physical condition is draining. Still, when he tells the author “You’re my girl,” it’s easy for readers to crack a smile.
An immediate, absorbing, intimate account.
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