Blog Archives
Evenings on the Edge of Death
Evenings on the Edge of Death is a deeply personal work of poeticized nonfiction about the long afterlife of family trauma, the erosion of memory, and the complicated work of loving people who have also caused pain. Theodore McDowell builds the book as a series of collages centered on his mother, father, sister, marriage, and finally the experience of saying goodbye. The form suits the subject beautifully. Memory rarely arrives as a clean narrative, and McDowell doesn’t force it into one. Instead, a beach, a baseball glove, a glass of whiskey, a rosary, a wheelchair, a field of wheat, or the sound of water can suddenly open a door to another time. The result feels less like being told the story of a life than being invited inside the way that life is actually remembered.
At the center of the book is a family wounded by an abusive father and by the silence that grows around abuse. McDowell returns to those wounds from different angles, especially through his relationships with his mother and his sister Rachel. The opening poem establishes the emotional vocabulary immediately, placing a father’s violence beside wheat fields, church bells, maternal tenderness, and a child’s bewildered questions about God. What gives these poems their staying power is McDowell’s willingness to let contradictory feelings occupy the same room. He can rage at his father and still search for the damaged man inside him. He can adore his mother while admitting resentment, exhaustion, and even the terrible wish for her suffering to end. He can grieve Rachel’s suicide while continuing to wrestle with guilt over not saving her. Forgiveness here isn’t a neat resolution. It’s an ongoing argument between memory, love, anger, faith, and the child who still wants an explanation.
The book widens considerably in the poems about marriage. Here, McDowell brings the same searching attention to intimacy, addiction, estrangement, reconciliation, aging, and the fear of losing the person who has witnessed your life. In one poem, a couple plants seeds while wondering whether they’ve truly fallen in love; in another, thirty-nine years of marriage are remembered through happiness, miscarriage, addiction, recovery, service, and the simple act of holding hands on a porch as death approaches. These poems show one of McDowell’s strongest gifts: he finds emotional weight in physical things. Hands, weather, flowers, rooms, rivers, photographs, and worn objects keep carrying the story when abstract language would be too easy. His recurring Christian imagery sits alongside Buddhist meditation, blues music, nature, and art, giving the book a spiritual restlessness that feels earned.
By the final section, death has become less a single event than the book’s constant horizon. McDowell writes about hospice, nursing homes, dementia, the indignities of the body, forgotten names, and the fear that a whole human life might vanish when nobody remains to remember it. Yet the book keeps moving toward preservation. Again and again, writing becomes an act of keeping faith with the dead, with the damaged self, and with moments of beauty that would otherwise be lost. The closing poems return to the book’s rivers, grief, childhood wounds, faith, and questions of identity, but the final movement is toward grace and self-creation. Evenings on the Edge of Death turns the fragments of a wounded life into something enduring: a fierce, tender testament to memory, love, and the grace of still becoming.
Pages: 171 | ASIN : B0CVJ4PR85
Evenings on the Edge of Death
Evenings on the Edge of Death is Theodore McDowell’s deeply personal work of poeticized nonfiction, built from memories of childhood trauma, dementia, family violence, mental illness, marriage, addiction, faith, and grief. McDowell arranges the book as a series of emotional collages, moving through his relationships with his mother, father, sister, wife, and finally toward his own reckoning with aging and death. The form suits the subject beautifully. Memory rarely arrives in neat chronological order, especially when trauma and dementia are involved, and these pieces return again and again to certain images, gestures, places, and wounds. A nursing home window, a childhood beach, a glass of whiskey, a cathedral, a river, a garden, a hand reaching for another hand. The repetition gives the book the feeling of someone sorting through a lifetime and asking which memories have shaped him, which have damaged him, and which might still save him.
Some of the book’s strongest writing comes from McDowell’s willingness to hold love and injury in the same frame. His father can be frightening, abusive, wounded, and finally vulnerable. His mother is nurturing and beloved, but she also becomes inseparable from the complicated family history she helped sustain. His sister Rachel carries the scars of abuse into mental illness, addiction, and suicide, leaving her brother with grief that refuses any easy resolution. The poems about her are particularly haunting because McDowell keeps reaching past the manner of her death toward the girl she once was, the sister who danced, painted, dreamed, and made him feel safe. That movement is central to the whole book. He keeps trying to recover the person from the tragedy. Even forgiveness remains complicated. It isn’t presented as a clean moral achievement, but as something unfinished, painful, necessary, and sometimes beyond reach. The book understands that family love can survive alongside anger, and that grief often keeps both alive.
The later sections widen the emotional range as McDowell turns toward marriage, aging, illness, and the possibility of losing his own memory. His marriage becomes another place where the past keeps pressing on the present, but it’s also where tenderness, endurance, physical intimacy, disappointment, forgiveness, and companionship are allowed to coexist. The spiritual dimension grows richer here as well. Christianity is central, but McDowell’s religious imagination is restless and searching, filled with cathedrals, crucifixes, resurrection, Buddhist meditation, prayer, nature, doubt, and an almost physical hunger for grace. He repeatedly finds the sacred in ordinary things: cards played on a porch, hands joined during a walk, flowers in a garden, a wife waiting beside a hospital bed. One of the book’s most affecting ideas is that remembering someone can itself become an act of love. After his mother’s death, the speaker understands himself as her “memory keeper,” carrying her forward through stories and gestures passed to another generation.
By the final pages, Evenings on the Edge of Death has become more than a record of what happened to one family. It’s an inquiry into what remains after memory fails, bodies weaken, relationships fracture, and the people who knew our stories disappear. McDowell doesn’t leave the reader stranded in that darkness. His final movement toward self-creation and grace feels earned precisely because the book has spent so much time among bruises, hospital rooms, graves, addictions, regrets, and unanswered prayers. In the closing poem, fly fishing becomes an image of casting back into memory and trauma while still standing in the living current, and the book ends with the possibility of being made new even in old age. Evenings on the Edge of Death turns a lifetime of bruises, broken memories, love, and loss into something enduring: a testament to the stubborn grace that can still find us when almost everything else has slipped away.
Pages: 171 | ASIN : B0CVJ4PR85
Held in the Vanishing
Ti Mougne’s Held in the Vanishing is an intimate memoir about caring for two parents whose lives are being altered by different forms of dementia. Her father has Alzheimer’s disease, while her mother has Primary Progressive Aphasia, which gradually takes away her ability to understand and use language. Mougne writes from the complicated middle of this experience, where caregiving, marriage, parenting, work, and grief all occupy the same crowded space. Early in the book, she explains its purpose with striking simplicity: “Stories don’t offer maps. They offer companionship.” That idea shapes everything that follows.
The memoir begins with the lively multigenerational home Mougne created with her husband, son, and parents. Holiday dinners, elaborate parties, piano lessons, bad jokes, pets, and familiar household sounds give the reader a clear sense of what the family shared before dementia began changing its rhythms. This attention to ordinary life matters because it gives every later loss a history. Her parents aren’t presented only through their diagnoses. They’re a devoted couple who dance at their fiftieth-anniversary celebration, a mother who loves Halloween, and a father whose trusting nature becomes dangerous when Alzheimer’s damages his judgment. The warmth of these memories keeps the story grounded in people rather than conditions.
Mougne is especially perceptive about the work of caregiving that happens beyond public view. She describes the constant calculations involving medications, finances, safety, housing, dignity, and medical care, along with the guilt that seems to attach itself to every decision. She also examines how that responsibility affects her husband and son, and she’s candid about the anger, numbness, resentment, and exhaustion she carries. One of the book’s most honest insights is that “Sometimes love is nothing more than showing up again tomorrow.” Here, love often takes the form of gluten-free toast, a corrected television setting, a difficult phone call, or another visit after an emotionally bruising day.
The book’s short chapters and spacious, line-broken prose give it the feel of a memoir written partly through poetry. That style suits Mougne’s subject because dementia rarely unfolds as a smooth narrative. It arrives through fragments, repetitions, silences, brief recoveries, and sudden recognitions. Concrete images, including vanished ducklings, clouds admired from a car window, weekly margaritas, lightning bugs in a jar, and an empty road across the prairie, carry much of the emotional meaning. The later chapters turn inward as Mougne considers the identity she built around being a “good daughter” and begins finding a version of care that allows her to remain present without erasing herself.
Held in the Vanishing is a memoir about how love changes when memory, language, independence, and familiar family roles begin slipping away. It holds tenderness and frustration together without forcing either into a comforting conclusion. Mougne’s parents continue to decline, difficult choices continue to surface, and her understanding of herself continues to evolve. What gives the book its power is its close attention to what remains: humor, ritual, touch, shared meals, flashes of recognition, and the decision to stay connected even when connection has to take a new form. It’s a deeply personal account, but its emotional clarity makes the experience feel shared.
Pages: 151 | ASIN : B0H6N8CGHC
Secrets and Trauma
The Words She Left Behind tells your story as you become the caretaker for your estranged aunt and uncover, through journals, letters, and the devastation of Alzheimer’s, a more complicated woman than anyone understood. Why was this an important book for you to write?
This book was written with the intention of creating a timeline of events leading up to my aunt’s diagnosis. After unexpectedly finding my aunt’s journals, I realized there were profound secrets between the pages. I felt an intense urge to get to the core of her anger and hatred towards my family. Through the process of reading, interviewing, and research, I was able to find secrets and trauma, which then led me to build empathy and forgiveness. With an understanding of what had happened in my aunt’s life, I was able to share the details of my discoveries with my mother, her sister. We eventually all found healing due to the words she left behind in her journals.
When you found Toni’s journals, letters, and stored belongings, did your understanding of her change all at once or slowly over time?
The healing happened over time. At the same time I was reading her journals, I was also forming a relationship with my aunt–a relationship I never had with her. Through both experiences, I found compassion and empathy for her. This journey of forgiveness took over a year because there was so much hatred built up for almost twenty years.
How did caring for Toni reshape your relationship with your mother, Mary, and your understanding of their history as sisters?
My mother and I have always been close. Mary also never gave up hope that one day she and her sister could rebuild their relationship. At first, it was very difficult for my mother, but she eventually got to a place where love was able to grow between her and Toni again. It’s now a beautiful relationship. This was my goal all along–a gift to my mother.
Author Links: Linktree
Stained Glass Tainted by Dementia
Stained Glass Tainted by Dementia is a book-length work of poetic nonfiction about a son watching his mother disappear into dementia while trying to understand the family, faith, grief, and love that shaped them both. Theodore McDowell writes in short, poem-like pieces that feel intimate and immediate, almost like entries in a spiritual journal. The book begins with his mother as a figure of wonder, especially in the opening memory of a cathedral, candlelight, and childhood awe. When he writes, “Mom was more beautiful than stained glass,” he gives the reader the emotional key to the whole book.
The first half follows the author’s mother through memory care, illness, and death, but it also keeps returning to who she was before dementia took hold. She’s a nurse, a gardener, a dancer, a mother, a woman shaped by poverty, marriage, faith, fear, and resilience. McDowell doesn’t flatten her into sainthood. He lets her be complicated, loving, wounded, and sometimes unable to protect the people she loves. That honesty gives the book its weight.
One of the strongest things about the writing is the way ordinary caregiving moments become sacred without losing their physical reality. Washing a face, feeding puree, changing clothes, sitting in silence, and watching someone search for a name all become acts of witness. The religious imagery is everywhere, but it’s grounded in bodies, rooms, porches, wheelchairs, storms, and nursing home hallways. The line “I am their memory keeper” captures the role McDowell takes on throughout the book, carrying what his parents can no longer hold.
The second half opens the book outward, moving from the author’s mother to a wider collage of people living with dementia and those caring for them. These pieces give the book a larger human reach, showing spouses, children, caretakers, and patients caught in different versions of the same unraveling. Music, gardens, birds, oceans, and old dance halls keep returning as places where memory flickers back to life. Even when the scenes are painful, the writing keeps looking for dignity in the person who remains.
This is a deeply personal book, but it’s also a meditation on what love asks of us when memory breaks down. McDowell’s style is lyrical, prayerful, and often raw, with images that linger after the page turns. The book is at its best when it lets grief sit beside tenderness, anger beside forgiveness, and faith beside doubt. Stained Glass Tainted by Dementia reads like a long act of remembrance, one that honors a mother, mourns a disease, and gives language to the slow work of saying goodbye.
Pages: 239 | ASIN : B0GFB3Z3L6
Stained Glass Tainted by Dementia
Stained Glass Tainted by Dementia is a lyrical work of poeticized nonfiction about a son watching his mother vanish into dementia while trying to preserve the woman she was: devout, wounded, resilient, flawed, and beautiful. Theodore McDowell structures the book first around his mother’s decline and death, then widens the lens into a collage of dementia as experienced by patients, spouses, family members, and caretakers. The result is less a conventional memoir than a sequence of elegies, prayers, memories, and reckonings, all circling the same terrible truth: love does not prevent loss, but it can bear witness to it.
What moved me most was the book’s refusal to make dementia neat. McDowell does not soften the disease into a sentimental lesson. He shows its bewilderment, its humiliations, its repeated thefts of language, identity, and family roles. Yet the writing keeps searching for grace in the wreckage. A mother becomes stained glass, a garden becomes consecrated ground, a jazz trio briefly restores old romance to dull eyes. These images could have felt ornate, but at their best, they act like small lamps in a dark ward, illuminating what clinical language cannot reach.
I also appreciated the emotional candor beneath the beauty. This is not simply a son praising his mother; it is a son sorting through devotion, anger, religious inheritance, family violence, forgiveness, and guilt. That complexity gives the book its pulse. At times, the intensity of the imagery is almost overwhelming, but that excess feels tied to the subject itself. Grief is not tidy prose. Dementia breaks continuity, and McDowell answers with fragments that shimmer, bruise, and repeat like memory trying to repair itself.
The target audience for this book includes readers of memoirs, grief literature, dementia narratives, caregiving books, poetry, spiritual memoirs, family trauma, and literary elegies. Readers who admire Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking may recognize a similar attempt to make art out of bereavement, though McDowell’s voice is more prayerful, more image-soaked, and more overtly devotional. Stained Glass Tainted by Dementia is a sorrowful, luminous book that turns memory into a chapel for the vanishing.
Pages: 239 | ASIN : B0GFB3Z3L6
Effective Care Leader
Breakthrough Alzheimer’s Care is a practical guide in which you transform your experience caring for your mother into a five-pillar framework for building safer, warmer, and more loving dementia care. Why was this an important book for you to write?
After my mom passed people told me I did some amazing and creative things that helped my mom live much happier and and nearly three times longer than expected and that I should write a book to help others in the same way. I thought I could help people, it was also therapeutic to help me with my grief of losing her, and it was a testement to my amazing mom too. So that is why I wrote my book.
How did your mother’s personality shape the care system you built around her?
My mom was always so loving and caring of me, my sister, and all the kindergarten children she taaught. So I wanted to show the same kind of loving and caring for her in her most serious time of need with Alzheimer’s. She was also so trusting of me my whole life; this made it fairly easy to try lots of things that helped her, and bringing in the most amazing home caregivers that helped me help her with happiness and longevity.
What advice would you give families who feel overwhelmed by the practical demands of Alzheimer’s care?
Just because there is no cure for Alzheimer’s does not mean you can’t make a huge difference in your loved one’s happiness and health. When you do make this big difference, you will feel happier and healthier too. Your positivity, energy, and happiness are key to your being a bold, empowered, and effective care leader for your loved one.
What do you hope caregivers remember most after reading Breakthrough Alzheimer’s Care?
1) Be positive, empowered, hopeful, and follow my plan, and your loved one will benefit immensely and so will you!!
2) Love is about sacrifice. Showing your loved one this love and sacrifice may be the hardest thing you have ever done, but it will make you a better version of yourself, and you will be so glad you had the privilege of being your loved one’s care leader.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website | Amazon
Part memoir and part how-to guide, this compelling book blends personal reflection with research-based insights and practical tools that help families transform their Alzheimer’s care experience. Readers will find detailed guidance on how to:
Design a daily routine that supports physical, emotional, and cognitive well-being.
Apply nutrition and brain health strategies proven to enhance function and mood.
Use cognitive stimulation to preserve memory and engagement.
Select, coach, and lead caregivers as an effective care team.
Improve communication and outcomes during doctor visits.
Access mobile medical support and technology-based care solutions.
Prevent caregiver burnout through strong leadership and self-care.
Unlike traditional caregiver manuals, Breakthrough Alzheimer’s Care goes beyond coping to offer a vision of thriving-showing how compassionate leadership and innovative thinking can dramatically improve quality of life for both the person with dementia and those who care for them.
Drawing from his personal journey, Mark shares hard-won lessons, practical systems, and heartwarming stories that illustrate what’s possible when caregivers combine love with strategy. His unique approach reframes caregiving as a mission of empowerment rather than endurance, encouraging readers to build hope, resilience, and teamwork every step of the way.
Whether you’re just beginning to navigate the challenges of Alzheimer’s or have been caring for a loved one for years, Breakthrough Alzheimer’s Care will help you find renewed purpose, strength, and connection. It’s an inspiring and transformative guide for every family touched by dementia-one that proves a better, brighter caregiving experience is within reach.
Unexpected Journey
Descent Into Dementialand is a raw, honest memoir about caregiving, memory loss, and a love that refuses to let go. You describe this as much a love story as a medical journey. How did your understanding of love change as Mike’s condition progressed?
Before Mike began to experience difficulties in communication that I would later learn were signs of progressive dementia, I viewed our love as a romantic, reciprocal partnership. As he gradually lost abilities, the reciprocal part never changed. I always knew and felt that he loved me dearly, and I continued to adore him. It was, of course, the partnership aspect that changed. Always so bright and capable and in control, he now needed me to navigate life and help him enjoy what remained of it. With his innate sunny disposition, he knew full well what awaited him, yet kept me laughing and loving him even more, as we navigated the coming storm together.
The book suggests that both the person with dementia and the caregiver are traveling through the same crisis, but in different ways. What do you wish more people understood about the caregiver’s emotional reality?
Of course, it is extremely gut-wrenching to watch someone with whom you have spent a lifetime gradually losing their identity and capabilities. I was constantly reminded by memories and photos that he was that same person, now struggling to hang on to the remnants of his past life. But for me, it was almost an honor to help him travel that last road. He had given me so much. At this point in time, we had become in many ways one person, fused together. I felt closer to him than I ever had.
You write openly about frustration, exhaustion, and even moments of irritation alongside love. Why was it important to include those less “idealized” emotions?
Because we are human, and those feelings are inescapable. Even though my logical brain told me that Mike was incapable of understanding what I was doing at some point or why I was doing it, that knowledge did not alleviate the frustration and anger I felt in the moment. I think many caregivers are too hard on themselves and feel guilty about normal reactions we all have. We would need to be robots not to feel these emotions.
What do you hope readers who have never experienced dementia take away from your story? For caregivers currently living this reality, what do you hope they feel when reading your book?
For readers who have never been touched by dementia, I hope that they come away with some knowledge about the condition. The odds are great that they will either develop dementia themselves or know someone who has. According to the Alzheimer’s Disease Association, someone in the world develops dementia every 3 seconds. There are over 55 million people worldwide now living with dementia. That number will almost double every 20 years, reaching 78 million in 2030 and 139 million in 2050. I also hope that it sparks conversations and awareness. I hope we can shine a light on this condition, often thought of as shameful or just a consequence of aging. I hope it increases charitable donations for finding a cure.
For caregivers who are currently living with this reality, I certainly hope that they, too, gain an understanding of what is happening, why it’s happening, and what to expect as dementia inevitably progresses. I hope that they realize that getting a diagnosis of the particular kind of dementia is critical, as it will open the door to resources for them and their loved one, and that knowing the progression of the particular dementia helps them prepare for what is to come. Most importantly, I hope that they learn to love themselves through this unexpected journey. Their feelings are normal and real, and they are not alone.
Author Links: GoodReads | Website | Amazon
“I love you as much as I ever did. It’s still me inside …”
For almost six decades, Sherry and her husband, Mike, have been by each other’s side. Through success and loss, hope and devastating trauma, they have shared a life of indomitable love and solidarity. Then, in 2018, that life was shattered when Mike was diagnosed with logopenic progressive aphasia, a rare and progressive form of dementia. But the signs had been present for some time. So began Mike’s journey into Dementialand—a terrifying place of no return. As always, Sherry was right by his side.
In this heartbreaking, yet love- and hope-filled memoir, part case study, Sherry candidly shares with the reader their lives both before and after the diagnosis. She theorizes about the root causes of Mike’s disease—still so mysterious to medical professionals—and enlightens the reader with resources providing academic context.
First and foremost, however, this is a warts-and-all journal about the reality of living with the cruel condition … the heartbreaking moments as well as the happy ones. It is a must-read for anyone searching for hope amid the despair. And, above all, proof that, through it all, the one thing Mike has never forgotten is his love for Sherry.
A portion of the proceeds from the sale of this book will be donated to Dementia/Alzheimer’s research.
