Homemaking for the Down-at-Heart
Finuala Dowling
Kwela
When my late mother-in-law’s cancer returned, she came to live with us and the last gift we were able to bestow was her wish to die in our home.
That final stay lasted an astonishing five weeks – astonishing because, afterwards, it was impossible to comprehend that it had not been a five-month stretch.
Finuala Dowling’s latest book tells the story of a family whose matriarch is in need of constant high-care during the last few years of her life.
The novel makes it very clear that I’d not have survived the toll on my family of offering intensive in-home patient care for a couple of years, nor the toll of having to make a decision about eventually acceding to institutional care.
Dowling tells her tale through the separate consciousnesses of the various family members, including that of the octogenarian who knows she is losing her brain to the corrodings of senile dementia.
A narrative technique that is heartbreakingly effective – showing as it does the extent to which during this crisis, each person shrinks into him- or herself, each grasping for some inner anchor in an attempt to withstand the inexorable imploding of the family’s framework.
The members of the once-close family seem to all bob gently against each other but never to really connect – rather like the family group Virginia Woolf gathers at the Ramsays’ holiday home in the opening part of To the Lighthouse.
Let me hasten to add that although Dowling writes with Woolf-like elegance, I find her work way more reader-friendly than Woolf’s.
The full-time care of a dying parent can present itself, before you’re there, as a natural and appropriate exchange of duty.
It can appear as if, properly managed, it would be no greater a burden than the full-time care of a baby. But there, as Homemaking for the Down-at-Heart makes clear, lies the rub.
With the care of an infant comes the joy of watching a child grow and mature; for the carers of the slowly dying, there is rarely more hope than for a temporary cessation of the deterioration and often only the guilty hope of a sooner – rather than later – death.
With the care of an infant comes the wonder of learning to know the new personality that emerges as the child develops; to the carers of an increasingly demented parent there comes the anguish of watching as a familiar and comforting body is usurped by a bewildering stranger.
That distress is accentuated by Dowling with her lacings through the tale of extracts from the elderly woman’s long ago and best-selling self-help book which lends its title to this novel.
We, and her daughter Margot, are never permitted to forget the warm and wise woman the now patience-eroding Zoe Thesen once was:
“I have called this book Homemaking for the Down-at-Heart, dear reader, because so many attempts to make a home begin with a sad-making loss. For the new home to begin, an old home must be lost…”
Zoe is slowly becoming lost to the home she created. Margot, who has lived in that home for most of her life, begins her own “sad-making loss”.
The daughter re-reads more words her mother wrote, “…Homemaking is not a competition. It is an elegiac art.” Elegiac… the word has contradictory meanings but to Zoe it means “rhythmic and beautiful, like poetry”.
Like Notes from the Dementia Ward, Dowling’s 2008 collection of poems written as elegy for her mother, once known as Eve van der Byl, this book clearly has autobiographical seeds.
For an interesting look under the bonnet of a well-crafted novel, and to get some idea of how an author meshes personal experience with rigorous writerly technique to create great fiction for everyone, I have been following Dowling’s blog entries.
Don’t let me give the impression that this book is gloomy doom – I’ve not told you yet about the Noël Coward moments.
Dowling, with fine playwright’s timing, recreates some of the “comedy of manners devolving inexorably, like falling dominoes, into farce”, scenes we’ve probably all lived on occasion.
Perhaps they’re an unavoidable by-product of stressful times.
It was good to realise I’m not alone in having, on occasion, to watch helplessly as life spins out into the ludicrous even as tragedy attempts to smother it.
I’ve looked forward, for a very long time, to read this novel and it was everything I hoped it would be.
Perhaps Zoe’s words convey best the tenderness and love in Dowling’s storytelling:
“Squalor is the natural by-product of a happy home. If there are no spent wine corks, blunt pencil stubs, no scattered crumbs or stray playing cards in your sitting room, then there has been no celebration, no pleasure, no thought and no play.”
l Richards, author, editor, poet and publisher, can be found online at www.darlingtonrichards.com - Cape Times