EVERYTHING LEFT TO REMEMBER

A memoir of Alzheimer’s and a mother and daughter’s journey across the Rockies and beyond.

In this follow-up to Unbound, Jagger chronicles the difficulties of coping with her mother’s Alzheimer’s, with which she was diagnosed in 2015. Growing up, her family members didn’t discuss their feelings. By the time Jagger was a teenager, she writes, “I developed a deep suspicion of emotions….I judged people who displayed them.” The author also contends that her parents treated her and her sister differently than her brothers. “I was handed the idea that my fulfillment, my eventual wholeness, was dependent on finding a nice guy,” she writes. As an adult, Jagger distanced herself from her mother, and for years, they moved in different directions. As a result, “I’d never really seen my mother…in her totality.” Following her mother’s diagnosis, Jagger decided that a trip could help their relationship. “This was not the first time I had run to Mother Nature looking for guidance,” she writes. With keen insight and thoughtful prose that captures both the emotions involved and the significance of the natural world in the author’s life, she recalls their journey across the Rockies, where they shared moments of loss, endured times of frustration, and found genuine joy in nature. Jagger also shares intimate details of the memories that began to surface as well as her reoccurring dreams, which allowed her to begin to make connections between her mother’s life and her own. During the process of trying to learn more about her mother, she realized that “this trip was never about unearthing the mystery living inside my mother, but the one that has been living deep inside of me.” Solemnly, the author acknowledges that, as her mother begins to forget her, she will be allowed to reclaim herself. “My focus shifted away from the loss,” she writes. “It felt, now, that there was much to be gained.”

A beautiful yet heart-wrenching tribute to the mother-daughter relationship.