The Freedom of Alzheimer’s

The Long Hello: Memory, My Mother and Me is a lyrical memoir—a hands-on, all-in, profoundly sensitive story that recounts Cathie Borrie’s thoughts and emotions as she cares for her mother, Jo, through her last years with Alzheimer’s. Jo, widowed, is in her mid eighties and is able to live alone in her own home thanks only to daily visits from Cathie. As the disease progresses, a constant rotation of live-in caregivers come and go, hired to help but never staying long enough to gain the confidence of Cathie or Jo.

Borrie holds nothing back in her writing and so we come to know the joy she discovers in the caregiving role. In an interview she describes how she started to view her mother’s world not as diminished but as a parallel one, possibly even elevated. As for her frustrations, “I try not to think about where I am and what I do all day or the things I used to do and miss most—working, studying, canoeing, movies. Men.” Yet we never feel that she is whining or complaining. We see the detail of her everyday life in a beautifully unsentimental narrative. Borrie’s writing style makes us feel we are friends, sitting together with a cup of tea, sharing our family stories.

She laments the loss of relationships, “I tuck her in. Drive home. Eat two bowls of cereal. Crawl into bed. Swaddled inside flannel sheets I hunker down under heavy wool blankets and wedge a pillow tight between my thighs, rocking back and forth. Into this slipped-down place drifts the memory of a man’s scent,” and we understand her loneliness, admire her dedication to her mother’s quality of life.

I can’t help but feel a strong connection with Borrie. The details that she shares of her mother’s decline in cognitive and motor skills draw me back to my own mother’s journey just a few years ago: her resistance to “strangers” in the house to help with her care, her insistence that she was being poisoned, her sadness at not being able to come home with me each time I visited, suspicion over money and who was looking after it, asking to see her loved ones who had long since died and, toward the end, forgetting how to use utensils to get food from her plate into her mouth. All these things hit home for me. Some were details I had mercifully forgotten, but they were more than balanced out by the lovely memories, the intimate connections made through words and phrases that were, like Jo’s, not ones my mom would ever have spoken in earlier times. There is freedom, a poetic sensibility that must come from stepping outside of the world as we know it. Alzheimer’s arrives with a new sense of reality. As Borrie shows us, we would all do well to listen more carefully, to respect the person who is uttering what sounds like absurd nonsense, to resist the urge to correct them and guide them back to our reality.

Asked by Fannie Kiefer of Shaw TV to explain the title, Borrie said “I learned at my mother’s side that something I was going to do was say hello to every phase of her illness and not goodbye.”

Who does not sympathize with the need to nurture and guide and how that somehow morphs into difficulty letting things progress naturally, doing nothing while all around us our world seems to be outside of our control? Somehow Borrie was able to understand this and change her approach while her mother was still alive.

Borrie credits her mother with bringing the lyrical quality to this story and we see that she is right through their dialogue. Borrie herself has a truly poetic style, especially when she writes of place.

The Long Hello should be in every library, long-term care facility and nursing home. It should be available to anyone who cares for someone with Alzheimer’s. It is easy to read—clear and short, meaningful and honest, written in beautiful language. The inevitable ending is managed with grace, love and respect.