The Living End: A Memoir of Forgetting and Forgiving
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About this ebook
The Living End is a tribute to an unforgettable woman, and a testimony to the way a disease can awaken an urgent desire for love and forgiveness. Told with sparkling wit and warmth, The Living End will resonate with families coping with Alzheimer's, and any reader looking for hope and inspiration.
Robert Leleux's grandmother JoAnn was a steel magnolia, an elegant and devastatingly witty woman: quick-tongued, generous in her affections, but sometimes oddly indifferent to the emotions of those who most needed her. When JoAnn began exhibiting signs of Alzheimer's, she'd been estranged from her daughter, Robert's mother Jessica, for decades. As her disease progressed, JoAnn lost most of her memories, but she also forgot her old wounds and anger. She became a happy, gentler person who was finally able to reach out to her daughter in what became a strangely life-affirming experience, an unexpected blessing that gave a divided family a second chance.
Robert Leleux
Robert Leleux teaches creative writing in the New York city schools. His nonfiction pieces have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Texas Observer, and elsewhere. He is the author of The Memoirs of a Beautiful Boy and The Living End. He lives with his husband, Michael Leleux, in Manhattan.
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Reviews for The Living End
4 ratings4 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Good book, loved the story of the life of his grandmother. She was a special lady.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I so enjoyed The Memoirs of a Beautiful Boy by Robert LeLeux that I had to read this "follow up" book. I enjoyed this one also. This book contains much about living with a family member who has Alzheimer's disease. I wish I had read a book like this before (or while) my family members were afflicted with Alzheimer's and dementia. I believe The Living End: a memoir of Forgetting and Forgiving would have helped me better deal with those I loved who were forgetting so much.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Leleux's memoir of the time he spent with his grandmother both before and after Alzheimer's disease is flat-out beautiful. He's witty and wry, snarky and spiritual, loving and loved. His trenchant observations are sprinkled with poetry and classical allusions and New York sass. I loved JoAnn, I loved learning about Leleux's dysfunctional but incredible family.
I want to read his other book right away, and I hope he's writing something else soon. 4.5 stars - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Robert captures the grace, humor and love of living with his grandmother's Alzheimers disease and focuses on the message "nothing is lost" Hopeful and loving, Robert writes lyrical prose.
Book preview
The Living End - Robert Leleux
ONE
The Measure of Her Powers
On the last Tuesday of June 2004—one of those sweltering days of high summer when the Texas air and the Texas people hang thick and limp as wet velvet, and the sting of the heat and the temperature itself both seem as impossible as snow—I hopped the first plane from New York to Houston and beat my grandmother JoAnn to the hospital. I remember that morning plainly because it was the last time I saw JoAnn as I’d always known her. I remember the sleeveless red summer dress that she, always so effortlessly slim, wore when she entered the hospital; and the novel I’d brought but couldn’t manage to read; and the battered, caramel leather briefcase my grandfather Alfred carried, stuffed with almost fifty years of his wife’s medical history. His executive instincts hadn’t relaxed in retirement: He believed in being prepared. Nothing, however, could have prepared us for the following few days.
Once JoAnn had been readied for surgery, Alfred and I sat with her in a stale, curtained-off stall in a wide and featureless hallway, waiting for the nurses to wheel her away to the operating room. JoAnn’s small body, which had looked lissome in her light summer dress, suddenly seemed fragile in her hospital gown, packed away like bone china in tissue paper. Propped up on her mechanical bed, thinly veiled from a row of identical beds by white muslin, she was already floating aloft on a cloud of anesthetic. So much so that by the time I sat beside her, her honey-colored hair falling softly on stiff, crackly pillows, she’d already begun raving about the people on the other side of the curtain.
If the good Lord Jesus had chosen those unlucky folks with an eye toward irritating my grandmother, he could not have done a better job. They were poor; they were loud; they had lamentable facial hair. It was, to JoAnn’s way of seeing things, a trifecta of wretchedness that she could not be expected to overlook under the best of circumstances. These were not the best of circumstances.
In some silent, spotlit corner of her heart, I believe that JoAnn had been relishing the thought of this moment, this Terms of Endearment moment, the moment just before being wheeled away on her gurney. She had, I imagine, expected this to develop into a fraught, turgid scene, an eleven o’clock number, her own starring turn. From a certain perspective, it was a rare opportunity. After all, in a whole lifetime of Oscar-worthy performances, how many actual gurneys can a lady expect to get?
Another turgid scene, however, competed for our attention. Robert,
JoAnn began, in an artfully wan, parched little voice, I want you to always remember just how much I love—
"Aww, now, Mama. You ain’t got nothin’ to worry about!" A little man, whose wiry, wasted frame I could see through the curtain, began softly screaming to his sobbing bride.
I’m terribly sorry,
I was forced to say to JoAnn, but would you mind repeating that?
Alfred,
she started again a few moments later, a bit more powerfully than before. I don’t want you to feel guilty if I d—
Do ya hear what I’m telling ya, Mama?
the man, noticeably louder than before, began to howl.
Forgive me, darlin’,
my grandfather said to his wife, could you run that past me one more time?
No matter how hard we tried, it was impossible not to be distracted by that wee, shrieking man, JoAnn’s new peer and rival, who seemed to be taking such obvious pleasure in his own performance. The situation resembled that of two dueling opera divas, who, finding themselves booked into adjacent rehearsal halls, decide to belt the other out of the audible range. Mere moments before, JoAnn had sounded hoarse and weary. But now, warmed by the spirit of competition, she began shouting like a saloon keeper in a shoot-’em-up Western. "Would you look at them! she hollered, gesturing toward the curtain.
How do they always find me? Why is it always them? He’s as hairless as a Mexican dog, and she’s Moby Dick with a beard! No matter where you go, it’s the same. He’s a Chihuahua and she’s the Bearded Lady!"
According to my grandparents, the Texas proletariat was composed almost entirely of whiskerless, whisker-thin men and woolly, well-upholstered women. It was a frequent subject of their conversations. Look, Sonny,
my grandfather had told me when I was a small boy, pointing toward one of these Jack Spratt couples on the street, the poor man wants heat in the winter and shade in the summertime.
Of course, I was appalled by JoAnn’s remarks, but they seemed to be accepted as a challenge by the man behind the curtain. "Cain’t ya hear me, Mama? Cain’t you hear me tawking to you?" With every repetition, his voice rose in pitch and emphasis, until finally, his falsetto seemed actually to lift him off the floor and JoAnn from her bed.
Waving her arms with a mad flourish—like Tosca, like the Valkyries, like Maria Callas in anything—JoAnn sang out triumphantly, while attempting to rap on the muslin. CAN SHE HEAR YOU? EVERYBODY HEARS YOU! MAMA HEARS YOU! I HEAR YOU! BUT GUESS WHAT, OLIVE OYL? NOBODY WANTS TO HEAR YOU!
A low, mortified murmuring began on the other side of the curtain. For a moment, I couldn’t tell if JoAnn had vanquished her opposition or if it was merely regrouping. Either way, it was never wise to underestimate little men like the Chihuahua. Some of them possess surprising stamina. I eyed the curtain anxiously. For a moment we sat waiting and listening. And then, through the muslin, there came a low, defeated wheeze, like a punctured balloon.
Can you believe that things like this can happen in America? And that you and I have to listen to it? A little GRACE AND BEAUTY? YOU KNOW? A LITTLE EFFING GRACE!
JoAnn continued to rant, her strength and volume decreasing, until she finally wound down like an outraged top, collapsing onto her pillow, mumbling all but incoherently, I can’t believe. We actually. Have to listen … Just a little effing grace.
Then she was off to dreamland.
I was accustomed to being scandalized by my grandmother. JoAnn was a marvelous person. She was not, however, a peppy, Hi!
person. She didn’t care about being nice. Screw nice!
she often told me. That was the sort of advice my grandmother gave. Screw nice
and Get a little meaner every day.
She told me these things because I am (sadly) one of those In-Between People, morally speaking. I’m one of those people who isn’t naturally virtuous but who aspires to be—a person who practically never recycles but feels guilty about it; someone who sails right past homeless people on my way to Starbucks but feels guilty about that, too. Hypocrites, I think we’re called. I don’t volunteer enough. I don’t read the newspaper enough. I’m not prone to frequent, spontaneous little combustions of random generosity enough. I’m simply a guilty-feeling person whose guilt does not alter his behavior. Whereas JoAnn was not a hypocrite, and she never felt guilty. For this reason, she was one of my life’s most refreshing presences. She lived in a post-guilt world that I loved to visit but couldn’t quite manage to live in. Why are you so mopey?
she’d asked me over the telephone a few months earlier, while I was trying (and failing) to cook chicken and