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Indeed, end-stage dementia threatens the popular Christian narrative of "prayer warrior" aging to its core. That narrative can accomodate some humorous lapses in memory and judgment: the old woman can forget her children's names, confuse a nurse for a granddaughter, even hobble into the dining room in her slip. What this narrative has not managed to hold, however, is an aging Christian's agnosticism, what Owens calls, in her mother's case, "the amputation of her spiritual sensibility." In his study of Alzheimer's and the love of God, Forgetting Whose We Are (Abingdon, 1996), historian David Keck writes that Alzheimer's "subverts our narratives" and "challenges and relativizes all of our assumptions about language, meaning, and humanity itself." He then develops what he calls an "Alzheimer's hermeneutic," which "learns through the humiliation of disease, dissolution, and death that we approach the Bible's narrative as creatures in need, creatures whose own selfhood is dependent on the support of the family, the church, and God." Owens' memoir would have been strengthened by reference to Keck's thorough exploration of dementia and Christian faith. Still, her account ends with a parallel move to Keck's analysis, with a measure of confidence that her mother's loss of volition, faith, and identity actually returns her to the arms of God.
While Owens gives her readers few distractions from the ache of her story, there are snatches of beauty and grace here. Owens labors throughout the book to figure out what remains of her mother's essential self, with decreasing success as time goes on. But she does discover an "underlying signification system" beneath her mother's garbled words and actions, one that she slowly learns to decipher. "The day before my brother or my daughters arrive for visits, she spends the afternoon cooking in her nursing home bed, propped up on pillows, handing me finished dishes to store away," Owens recounts. "'Is there enough?' she asks me with a worried look. 'Are the beds made?' These are her metaphors for love."
Just as she increasingly relies on her mother's gestures as glimpses of her true self, Owens herself more frequently turns to metaphor as the book goes on. Her lovely penultimate paragraphs, in which she reflects on her own grandchildren, move her story from past and present into the future:
Through our three generations of bodies runs a literal string of messages, etched in that most elegant of scripts, deoxyribonucleic acid. This chain, ladder, stream of life—call it by whatever metaphor you like—carries the letters of the dead to the yet-unborn. What are they saying? What do I want my note, tacked to the string, to say?
Only this: Loving people is such a burden. If love, in and of itself, weren't the center from which life flows, if it didn't, as Dante says, move the stars, how could we bear such weight?
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