Tulsa World,
May 4, 2003 Sunday Final Home Edition
By Patrica Ann Jones

A Living Nightmare.

Author relates her experience with Alzheimer's close-up: Death's warm-up act, Alzheimer's, is a brute. Eleanor Cooney says you'll never be the same once it's paid you a visit. "Just a short time ago," she writes, "I was ignorant. I'd heard stories, of course, but like winning the lottery or going to prison or being abducted by aliens, you just can't know how it is until you've lived it. Now I know. Alzheimer's is death in slow motion, and it has the ability to kill love while the person you love still breathes."

Cooney gives a harrowing portrait of the devastation Alzheimer's wreaks, not just on the victim but on those closest to her. She watched her mother, the brilliant, funny, sane, mother, Mary Durant, walk into that long, dark night of Alzheimer's and tried everything in her power to help, but every step she took proved to be a dead end, taking both mother and daughter deeper into the abyss of mindlessness.

Mary Durant was beautiful, a talented, successful writer, full of all the wonders of life when her beloved husband, Mike Harwood, died. She was unable to overcome her grief and soon those around her noticed changes in her personality. Changes that time should have healed but did not. All that follows in this shockingly frank and passionately written memoir is a life-lesson for both grown children and their parents.

Cooney shows her mother as unlike the mothers of her friends. "My mother was always my favorite person. And a lot of other people's, too. Hip, cool, brilliant, funny . . . a writer. My ultimate confidante and sympathizer. My friends always came to my house to escape their regular boring parents. I have a picture of me and a bunch of teenaged friends one summer in the mid-sixties cavorting in the backyard of the house in Connecticut, my mother sitting in our midst in a canvas chair, slim elegant blue-jeaned legs crossed, laughing. We're all free and easy, horsing around, performing for her. She's in her early forties, beautiful, probably a year or so away from meeting Mike (her third and most-loved husband."

After Mike's death, the first shadows fell on Mary Durant. Deep depressions lasted year after year, then blanks appeared in her short-term memory and disquietingly uncharacteristic lapses in judgment. Cooney explains that she now realizes her mother struggled to hide her condition for at least two years. Mary, too soon, graduated to delusions and disorientation and long-term memory loss. The disease that seemed to begin with Mike's death was diagnosed as Alzheimer's.

Throughout the memoir, Cooney documents the slow erosion of her mother's mind, the terrible unraveling of the bond they shared, and her own descent into drink, despair and the jagged edges of mental illness. As her mother conjures delusions of places and times with her late husband, Cooney revisits their real past, and her own, and gives them vibrant life. Mary's fantasies morph into the enthralling story of Eleanor's actual Cheeveresque childhood, the daring and lively mother she remembers and a time that no longer exists for either of them.

The author shows how she and her brother try to help their mother. First Cooney moved Mary from Connecticut to California to live in a small apartment near Eleanor's home. This didn't work. Then, Eleanor had a "granny unit" built onto her house so she could watch over Mary at all times. This was an even worse move. After this failure, Cooney confronts the necessity of placing her mother in an institution. Mary's peppery nature and still-powerful will defeats one choice after another.

Anyone assuming that Alzheimer's victims live in a happy, mindless state will discover here that on the contrary they are often agitated, confused, miserable, and angry. Cooney does not spare herself as scarred by wounded love; she reveals in relentless prose the true shape of the animal called Alzheimer's.

The reader might not be able to bear the truth of this book without Cooney's own special brand of black humor. I actually had to laugh out loud at times, perhaps with the author or maybe from pure frustration sensing the probable ending of the story.

My supposition was, thank heavens, wrong. Mary Durant and her multi-talented daughter, Eleanor, offer readers a most satisfying resolution to this deeply moving story. Eleanor even gives readers an amazing grace note by including, as an appendix, an unpublished short story by her mother.

Patricia Jones is a published writer and literary critic.

"Death in Slow Motion: My Mother's Descent into Alzheimer's"
By Eleanor Cooney
Published by HarperCollins, 250 pages,
$23.95

From Tulsa World, May 4, 2003 Sunday Final Home Edition