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An Enlightened Reflection on Life with Alzheimer's
Free Press
September 2007
On Sale: August 21, 2007
240 pages
ISBN: 1416573208
EAN: 9781416573203
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir
With his first memoir, Losing My Mind, Thomas DeBaggio
stunned readers by laying bare his faltering mind in a
haunting and beautiful meditation on the centrality of
memory to human life, and on his loss of it to early-onset
Alzheimer's disease. In this second extraordinary narrative,
he confronts the ultimate loss: that of life. And as only
DeBaggio could, he treats death as something to honor, to
marvel at, to learn from. Charting the progression of his disease with breathtaking
honesty, DeBaggio deftly describes the frustration, grief,
and terror of grappling with his deteriorating intellectual
faculties. Even more affecting, the prose itself masterfully
represents the mental vicissitudes of his disease --
DeBaggio's fragments of memory, observation, and rumination
surface and subside in the reader's experience much as they
might in his own mind. His frank, lilting voice and abundant
sense of wonder bind these fragments into a fluid and poetic
portrait of life and loss. Over the course of the book, DeBaggio revisits many of the
people, places, and events of his life, both in his memory
and in fact. In a sense, he is saying goodbye, paying his
respects to the world as it recedes from him -- and it is a
poignant irony that even as this happens, he is at the
height of his remarkable descriptive powers. In his moments
of clarity, his love for life's details only grows deeper
and richer: the limestone creek where he has fished for
years; his satisfying and lonely herb farming days; the
goldfish pond his son designed and built in his backyard in
honor of DeBaggio's passion for "any hole in the ground with
some liquid in it"; the thirty years in his beloved home in
Arlington, Virginia; his early career as a muckraker; the
innumerable precious moments spent with his wife and son;
his belated grief over his parents' deaths. Adeptly navigating between elegy and celebration, fear and
determination, confusion and clarity, DeBaggio delivers an
exquisitely moving and inspiring book that will resonate
with all those who have grappled with their own or their
loved ones' memory loss and with death.
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