The Summer of the Great-Grandmother
A loving daughter has promised her mother that she will never put her in a "nursing home" when the old lady is no longer able to live alone. But after her ninetieth birthday, when she arrives in Connecticut to spend the summer with her daughter's family, it becomes quickly apparent that atherosclerosis it taking its toll: the onoce-gentle Southern woman will not be able to make the trip home. This is the dilemma Madeleine L'Engle describes in this non-fiction book about the problems, crises, fustrations, and guilt engendered by her mother's rapid slide into senility.
When the summer begins, there are four generations gathered together, and the great-grandmother of the title--wiity, imperious, beautiful, self-assured--is now a ruin of her former self. She is no longer the mother Madeleine L'Engle once knew. A "bouquet of young girls" has been assembled to take turns tending the old lady, but if she is not able to return home in September when the girls go back to school and the family returns to New York, what are the alternatives to a nursing home? What of the promise given? How is the pain of watching the ravages of senility to be endured?
Although this book looks realistically and unsentimentally at death, deathing general ad the death of one person in particular, it is, ultimately, a book about life. It is a somewhat unconventional memoir of a dearly-loved parent, but it is much more; it is a book concerned wth the aged and the dying, a book that asks deep and searching questions, that examines and condemns many of the attitudes and values in our society. there are books--perhaps good and neccessary books--that speak out for "euthanasia," "death with dignity," "compassion for the aged," but such books are usually analytical, theoretical, or polemical. The Summer of the Great-Grandmother is about people--human beings, young, old, loving, grieving, declining, growing, dying--and will speak powefully to everyone who has, or has lost, an elderly parent.
(cover art may vary)