I have a tendency lately. My elderly parents (Mom is 93 and Dad is staggering his way toward 97) moved to my city to be closer to us as they aged. Which was entirely out of character. For decades they have lived pretty isolated lives; we were never big on celebrating holidays or milestones. No Sunday dinners, particularly. We would try to visit once or twice a year. For the last 25 years, they lived in the Yukon. In 2018, they moved to Saskatoon -- and I didn't realize the level of responsibility that arrived in the moving van with them. Elizabeth Hay's story about her own parents has startling similarities to my own experience, and I would often find myself jabbing my husband as we lay reading in bed at night: "Listen, let me read you this part! Doesn't this sound exactly the same!" It was reassuring that I was not the only daughter to experience this.
From Elizabeth Hay, one of Canada's beloved novelists, comes a startling and beautiful memoir about the drama of her parents' end, and the longer drama of being their daughter. Winner of the 2018 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonficiton.
Jean and Gordon Hay were a colourful, formidable pair. Jean, a late-blooming artist with a marvellous sense of humour, was superlatively frugal; nothing got wasted, not even maggoty soup. Gordon was a proud and ambitious schoolteacher with a terrifying temper, a deep streak of melancholy, and a devotion to flowers, cars, words, and his wife. As old age collides with…
I've said in another review that I'm showing a bit of a tendency with some of the books I'm choosing this year. The three I've chosen for The Shepherd are all about aging parents. They Left Us Everything has particular significance for me since the title is literal. The parents left their children to deal with a mammoth task: that of emptying a house with 23 rooms filled with STUFF. While my parents are still alive (Mom is 93 and Dad is closing in on 97) and they moved to my city to be closer to us "as we age," they too had a house in the Yukon stuffed with...stuff. It has been so with every house they've owned, but for each of their eight or nine moves prior to this last one, it was their task to do the move. Often, things were just abandoned in the houses they sold and left behind. But for this last big move--and the subsequent ones to assisted living for Mom and a care facility for Dad--was on us. Getting rid of stuff, as with comedy as our stand-up comic friend often says, "ain't so easy, is it?"
A warm, heartfelt memoir of family, loss, and a house jam-packed with decades of goods and memories.
After almost twenty years of caring for elderly parents—first for their senile father, and then for their cantankerous ninety-three-year old mother—author Plum Johnson and her three younger brothers have finally fallen to their middle-aged knees with conflicted feelings of grief and relief. Now they must empty and sell the beloved family home, twenty-three rooms bulging with history, antiques, and oxygen tanks. Plum thought: How tough will that be? I know how to buy garbage bags.
Again, I'm reading a few books lately that have to do with experiences in elderly parents, the role and responsibility of adult sons and daughters, and how to navigate the tricky and ever-changing tides of emotions. This book is funny, sad, a little frightening.
The adventure begins when Meg’s mother, Addie, vacationing in Florida, takes a spill. At the hospital, Addie bolts upright on her gurney and yells “I demand an autopsy!” before passing out cold.
“One minute, she is unconscious, the next, she’s nuts,” observes Meg Federico in this hilarious and poignant memoir of taking care of eighty-year-old Addie and her relatively new (and equally old) husband, Walter, in their not-so-golden years.
Addie’s accident is a portent of things to come over the next two years as Meg oversees her mother’s home care in the Departure Lounge, the nickname Meg gives Addie and…
Physical and emotional isolation shape the Burke family story in the 1920s and 1930s when homesteaders scratched out a new existence on the western Canadian prairie. William, an adventurer from New Zealand, brings his city bride Louise to the freshly broken earth of his farm near Watrous, Saskatchewan. Their story unfolds against the sweep of Saskatchewan prairie, and with the birth of a son, the couple believes their future is optimistic. Then Violet, the child born ‘feebleminded,’ plunges her mother—a woman burdened with a secret—back to a time of guilt and regret. The child draws out goodness, and weakness, in farmers Nik and Hanusia Yuzik, and loyalty in neighbours Hank and Emily. But tragedy and an unspeakable betrayal by William’s trusted friend upend the Burke family, taking all these characters at breakneck speed toward forgiveness and the realization that no one is infallible. So many choices, seemingly insignificant decisions, and twists of fate all have their reckonings. Based on a true story, the novel, won a 2021 Saskatchewan Book Award and was also shortlisted for the inaugural Glengarry Book Award that year. Writer Alice Kuipers calls it “a stunning exploration of love, disability, family, and loss.” Novelist Anne Simpson says it is a “graceful, poignant debut novel,” a story told with “compelling power.” It won the 2019 John V. Hicks Award for Fiction; judges Elisabeth de Mariaffi and Rabindranath Maharaj call it an “intricately-told, historical novel (with) modern connotations broaching our current conversation around trauma, consent, and sexual assault… Scenes linger, and resonate in the mind.” Reviewer Shelley Leedahl writes: "This book succeeds so well because the writer’s learned the tricky art of literary balance, ie, as skilled as she is at penning descriptive scenes, they never slow the pacing of this taut novel. The book’s structure is nuanced, and seemingly minor details – like a fishhook caught in an eye – have resonance. The characters are people we know or can very easily imagine. Here’s Hanusia, the raw Ukrainian midwife, upon the birth of John: “‘So quick first baby! Much hair. Strong boy, good for farm work. Your husband, he will be happy.’”) And the plot? Movie potential." When the novel was rereleased by Shadowpaw Press in 2023, Leedahl wrote, "Sometimes a book is so phenomenal it goes into multiple printings...such is the case with Small Reckonings...This story's got staying power."
