Do You Remember Me?: A Father, a Daughter, and a Search for the Self

by Judith Levine

In her award-winning Harmful to Minors , Judith Levine radically disturbed our fixed ideas about childhood. Now, the poignantly personal Do You Remember Me? tackles the other end of life. The book is both the memoir of a daughter coming to terms with a difficult father who is sinking into dementia and an insightful exploration of the ways we think about disability, aging, and the self as it resides in the body and the world.
In prose that is unsentimental yet moving, serious yet darkly funny, complex in emotion and ideas yet spare in diction, Levine reassembles her father's personal and professional history even as he is losing track of it. She unpeels the layers of his complicated personality and uncovers information that surprises even her mother, to whom her father has been married for more than sixty years.
As her father deteriorates, the family consensus about who he was and is and how best to care for him constantly threatens to collapse. Levine recounts the painful discussions, mad outbursts, and gingerly negotiations, and dissects the shifting alliances among family, friends, and a changing guard of hired caretakers. Spending more and more time with her father, she confronts a relationship that has long felt bereft of love. By caring for his needs, she learns to care about and, slowly, to love him.
While Levine chronicles these developments, she looks outside her family for the sources of their perceptions and expectations, deftly weaving politics, science, history, and philosophy into their personal story. A memoir opens up to become a critique of our culture's attitudes toward the old and demented. A claustrophobic account of Alzheimer's is transformed into a complex lesson about love, duty, and community.
What creates a self and keeps it whole? Levine insists that only the collaboration of others can safeguard her father's self against the riddling of his brain. Embracing interdependence and vulnerability, not autonomy and productivity, as the seminal elements of our humanity, Levine challenges herself and her readers to find new meaning, even hope, in one man's mortality and our own.

Genres: Memoir, Biography

320 pages, Hardcover

First published May 4, 2004

Reviews

[Kathryn · Rating 2 out of 5]

The author tells the story of her father's dementia. Just because she can, I guess. Because she is a writer, so it's natural for her to write about whatever is important in her life. She seems particularly concerned with the question of when is a person not a person, and discusses it at some length from several different angles throughout the book. She advocates for considering Alzheimer's patients as people, for appreciating them as they are, for who they are, without judging them for who they are not. The only enlightening thing I found in the book was the rebellion against the assumptions that are made by Alzheimer's groups, the "story line" that everyone is pressured to agree with. The author's experience was not always in line with the story line, and she was brave about admitting when it did not, and seeing it as it was, instead of trying to make it fit into the accepted roles and stories.

[Lucia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Levine writes a very honest and thought-out memoir of the experience of watching her father advance through the different stages of Alzheimers. Her research into cognitive and neurological information is impressive, but also her observations and conclusions about her father's mind's deterioration into dementia and her (and her family's) reactions. Watching a father, the "leader and strong person" in a family go through a mind-losing process is hard, the whole family dynamic is forced to adjust, but also each person individually. I also found a bit haunting the questioning of what is our self, and does this self survive the mind-losing process. My personal answer is that yes, our soul is personal, private and very much alive, even in dementia. Maybe it gets hidden a little as the the communication and reasoning skills are lost, but it is definitely there, it is the esence of who we are and dictates our likes and dislikes, as well as our reactions and emotions, up to the very end.

[Sara Van Dyck · Rating 4 out of 5]

Levine recounts the slow deterioration of her father, and the struggles of Levine’s mother and the author herself, as Dad moves through stages of Alzheimer’s. This is a remarkably honest discussions of the way the disease affects family relationships as long-suppressed feelings emerge under the pressure. Levine’s characters are hardly ”inspiring”: Dad has always been accomplished but flawed, difficult, giving little love. Mom feels deprived and looks to escape, and daughter Judith is filled with love and resentment for both. I found this refreshing and helpful in acknowledging that often no positive solution is possible, that at best we muddle through. For the reader actually dealing with the problems of a family member with dementia, I'd give this 5 stars - a must-read.

[Catherine · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a memoire of the writer and her family as they live through her father's Alzheimer's disease. Having seen my own mother deteriorate with this disease I was interested on the author's perspective and found her take on things interesting. Her situation was different than mine, but her recounting of how Alzheimer's affected her father was useful and her own responses to the situation insightful. It is not an uplifting book, nor did I expect it to be. I was looking for a way to understand something that is difficult at best, and found a little more insight through another person's story.