Enter Mourning: A Memoir on Death, Dementia, & Coming Home

• Heather Menzies
• Key Porter Books, 2009
• Paperback, 239 pages
• 9781554701551

Heather Menzies led a fairly normal life sandwiched between a demanding career and a busy family typical of her baby-boomer generation. Then the ground shifted. Her aging widowed mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.     Enter Mourning: A Memoir on Death, Dementia, and Coming Home chronicles Menzies’s transformative journey with her mother as words fail and the very nature of communication is redefined. Family dynamics among sisters and brothers come to the fore as the roles and responsibilities of the parent shift to the children: from moving their mother to a seniors' residence to signing a medical power of attorney to the matriarch's physical decline, to her safe passage into death. Menzies and her siblings experience growing old--and growing up--in touching and heart-wrenching ways.   

Grounded with personal, intimate photos, Enter Mourning balances poetic and practical sensibilities in its tale of a mother losing her grip on reality and a daughter coming to grips with her own.