YOU WERE STILL DANCING

A family’s experience with Alzheimer’s leads to deep reflections on the disease and its effects in this memoir.

The author opens her narrative by challenging readers to reconsider what they see when looking at a “beloved stranger,” her affecting term for a loved one who has been afflicted with Alzheimer’s. For Benz, her mother’s diagnoses—first mild cognitive impairment in 2008, and then Alzheimer’s a year later—were the latest in a series of gut punches to the family. “Generations of Alzheimer’s runs through my blood,” the author writes, describing how her grandmother, whom she called Ma, succumbed to the disease. She recounts the harrowing moments when her grandmother would escape the house during episodes of “Sundowners Syndrome” (a state of confusion occurring in the late afternoon) to desperately seek her baby—a child she had lost decades earlier. (Heartbreaking echoes of “Where is my baby, where is my baby?” fill the house in Benz’s haunting descriptions.) The trauma of those experiences left the author and her mother with a deep fear of Alzheimer’s, so accepting the new reality—it was now Benz’s turn to take care of her mother—was particularly difficult, even as the signs became obvious, “Like dominos falling into each other.” After breaking her arm, Benz’s mother was moved from her Cincinnati home to live with the author, her husband, and her three sons in Atlanta, leaving the author to deal with her mother’s constant pleading to return home and numerous difficult moments (she even witnessed her mother eating dog kibble on Easter). The suffering woman’s condition deteriorated from there.

Benz leads readers through the specific technical details of how Alzheimer’s attacks the brain and the complicated process of moving an elderly patient into an assisted living facility with memory care, and she evokes the helplessness of watching professionals abandon her mother as she reached an advanced stage requiring specialized hospice care until the end of her life. In describing her own emotional state throughout each of these ordeals, Benz crafts some truly beautiful turns of phrase: “Dust and dirt were spinning around us in a cataclysmic vacuum of struggle and loss,” she writes. “But, occasionally, the sun’s rays broke through.” She writes in an understated but powerful voice as she thoroughly examines the effects of Alzheimer’s from all angles, acknowledging the absurdity and even occasional moments of humor in dealing with a loved one caught in what she calls the “otherworldly ‘dementia dimension’” (Benz describes listening to her mother insist that she had jumped out of a plane with George H.W. Bush). The author’s extensive research into the disease gives her great authority when discussing it. Some chapters can feel like mere summaries of longer explanations, but she engagingly integrates striking facts throughout, such as the mention of how many gigabytes of memories the human brain makes in a day. Benz’s narrative is filled with quiet, simple moments that she imbues with profound meaning, such as simply looking up from a sandwich to see her mother smile, leading the author to vow to be more present and better honor the life in front of her—something she has certainly done with this work.

Thoughtful research and beautifully examined emotions offer a full, compelling view of Alzheimer’s.