Looking After: A Son's Memoir [Paperback]

John Daniel (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 1997 | ISBN-10: 1887178597 | ISBN-13: 978-1887178594 | Edition: First Edition

A poet and an essayist, John Daniel weaves graceful meditations on the nature of memory, identity, aging, and the tenacity of family into this moving account of his mothers last years. Uneasy in his role as caregiver, Daniel struggles with guilt, embarrassment, and anger over his mothers transformation. As she loses her memory to Alzheimers, he delves into his own in a passionate attempt to rememberfor her and for himselfthe remarkable history of their lives. Vagabond and spiritual seeker, wife and mother, and former labor organizer, Ziller Daniel led a full and varied life. But in the fall of 1988, troubled with the onset of Alzheimers she comes to Portland, Oregon to live with her son and his wife. Evolving slowly into the unfamiliar, she watches dogwood leaves outside the kitchen window, reads poetry, asks and re-asks the names of birds.Uneasy in his role as caregiver, and coping with his own depression, John Daniel struggles with guilt, embarrassment, and anger over his mothers transformation. As she loses her memory, Daniel delves into his own, uncovering both the root of his depression and the medicine for its cure in fragmented, long-dormant recollections of his childhood and youth.Mother and son journey through difficult and mysterious terrain, divining a path to each other and the world around them. Whatever she recognized, whatever she perceived, whatever she sensed, she faced the good world she had loved and now was becoming again. The world flowed in through her window, flowed into her open eyes whatever they saw, even as she flowed forth to join the world from the personhood of her many days.Combining graceful prose with the tenacity of a lifelong seeker, John Daniel pays tribute to the life of a remarkable woman and depicts the burdens and unexpected blessings of caring for her. In the midst of daily tension and occasional despair Daniel comprehendsthen shares with usZillas deep smile of the spirit. "

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In 1988, at the age of 80, Zilla, the author's independent, adventurous mother, became unable to continue living alone on the Maine seacoast and relocated to her son's home in Portland. Daniel, a poet (Common Ground), essayist (The Trail Home) and teacher, here relates the four difficult years he and his wife, Marilyn, spent caring for Zilla, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. In graceful, poignant prose, he describes how his mother, a former labor organizer and spiritual seeker who traveled to ashrams in India, declined into an increasingly helpless old woman. The author is at his best when recounting his sometimes fruitful attempts to communicate with Zilla and in describing the strain caretaking put on his marriage. His mother died in 1992. Daniel also recalls events from his childhood in an attempt to fight an ongoing depression. Although some of his memories are interesting, accounts of his LSD trips are repetitive, and his relentless introspection grows tiresome.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Ostensibly, this memoir focuses on the last four years in the long, adventurous life of the physically and mentally failing Zilla Daniel while in the care of the author, her son. John himself is struggling with a midlife depression that is constantly clouding his prospects, after years of drifting and substance abuse. Daniel (who has produced two books of poetry as well as an increasingly influential body of environmental journalism) leaves no doubt here that he can breathe new life into the familiar metaphors of received wisdom. Just as the possible meanings of the title broaden as the narrative progresses, the book itself covers more territory, above and beneath its trendy surface appeal (aging-parent problem, Alzheimer's, cascadia, hippiedom revisited, cats, and New Age psychodynamics). Underpinning the narrative is nothing less than a running essay on the nature of memory, culminating in the author's willingness?after closely witnessing his mother's mental decline?to abandon his previous notions of memory as a necessary determinant of human worth. Recommended for public and academic libraries.?John Dye, Panhandle State Univ., Goodwell, Okla.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Counterpoint; First Edition edition (October 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1887178597
• ISBN-13: 978-1887178594
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.7 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,157,661 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

John Daniel, a former logger, hod carrier, railroader, and rock climbing instructor, is the author of nine books of memoir, personal essays, and poetry. His new work, The Far Corner: Northwestern Views on Land, Life, and Literature, published by Counterpoint in April 2009, is a collection of personal essays that explore various subjects in the human and more-than-human worlds, seeking to define his allegiances to his home places and region and the wholeness of life itself.

Rogue River Journal: A Winter Alone, released in 2005, is an account of a four-and-a-half-month experiment in solitude in the backcountry of the Klamath Mountains in southwestern Oregon, and also a memoir of Daniel's father's life and career in the American labor movement and of his own growing up and coming of age in the 1950s and 1960s. Rogue River Journal was one of six books awarded a 2006 PNBA Book Award by the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association.

John Daniel has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University, a James Thurber Writer-in-Residence at Ohio State University, and a Research and Writing Fellow at Oregon State University's Center for the Humanities. In fall semester 2005 he was Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at St. Mary's College of California, teaching the MFA workshop in literary nonfiction. In 2003-04, 2004-05, and spring 2006, he was the Viebranz Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at St. Lawrence University in northern New York State. He is now conducting a yearlong memoir workshop through Fishtrap in northeast Oregon.

Two of Daniel's books, The Trail Home and Looking After: A Son's Memoir, have won the Oregon Book Award for Literary Nonfiction from Literary Arts, a private non-profit that seeks to enrich the lives of Oregonians through language and literature. In 1998-99 he held a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has also won the Andres Berger Award for Creative Nonfiction, the annual John Burroughs Nature Essay Award, and a Pushcart Prize, among other honors.

Essays and articles by John Daniel have appeared in Audubon, Outside, Portland, Bloomsbury Review, North American Review, Southwest Review, and other journals and magazines, and in such anthologies as Nature Writing: The Tradition in English, the annual American Nature Writing series, and Facing the Lion: Writers on Life and Craft. His poems have been published in Poetry, The Southern Review, Sierra, The Pushcart Prize VIII, Poetry of the American West, and other journals and anthologies. His two collections are Common Ground and All Things Touched by Wind. He is poetry editor of Wilderness magazine, the annual publication of the Wilderness Society.

John Daniel lives with his wife, Marilyn Daniel, plus two cats, a dog, and usually a pack rat, in the Coast Range foothills west of Eugene, Oregon. His web address is www.johndaniel-author.net.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A tender and loving tribute to a remarkable woman, April 17, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Looking After: A Son's Memoir (Paperback)

"Looking After: A Son's Memoir" is as loving a tribute as I can imagine. It is a blend of joy and sorrow as Mr. Daniel's remembers and shares his caring for his dying mother. I have mentioned this book to friends who have also cared for dying parents and each person to whom I gave the book found in it a companion. It is a wise and honest book. As the pages progress, I had the sense that Mr. Daniels was growing more clear as to who his mother was, and in doing so loved her all the more. He lets her go at the end, with gratitude for a life well lived.

5.0 out of 5 stars The Stream Singing in Darkness, July 15, 2009

By 

John Thorndike "Author: The Last of His Mind:... (Athens, OH United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Looking After: A Sons' Memoir (Hardcover)

A gem. Admirably written and consistently fascinating, it's not for someone who's looking for a set of symptoms, or an account of all the ways an Alzheimer's patient can make things difficult. Instead, it's a nuanced portrait of a woman who led an idiosyncratic and dramatic life, followed by a typical--yet entirely particular--slide into dementia.

I've read many Alzheimer's memoirs, and John Daniel's observations and emotions are often as familiar to me as the back of my hand. But I light up to see things put so deftly: "You don't get a second chance to live your mother's last years. She dies and it all freezes in place, everything you did and didn't do. I wish I could have been more patient with her, more supple, more willing to follow her lead instead of so often imposing my own will."

Regret. What history of Alzheimer's comes without it? The patient is often anguished in some way, and the caretaker cannot avoid regret about the care he's given. But Daniel reaches behind the confines of his mother's hard last years. "My mother did not get cheated," he writes. "She wore her body down, played it out, scoured it away with living. Maybe she did end her life on purpose. And maybe she did it not because she felt unwanted, not because of anything I did or didn't do, but because the boat was failing her, and like the stream singing in darkness, she wanted to go on."

This is a book worth a close slow reading, and a story that will stay with you.