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Wormsloe Foundation
I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird: A Daughter's Memoir
Susan Cerulean’s memoir trains a naturalist’s eye and a daughter’s heart on the lingering death of a beloved parent from dementia. At the same time, the book explores an activist’s lifelong search to be of service to the embattled natural world. During the years she cared for her father, Cerulean also volunteered as a steward of wild shorebirds along the Florida coast. Her territory was a tiny island just south of the Apalachicola bridge where she located and protected nesting shorebirds, including least terns and American oystercatchers. I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird weaves together intimate facets of adult caregiving and the consolation of nature, detailing Cerulean’s experiences of tending to both.
The natural world is the “sustaining body” into which we are born. In similar ways, we face not only a crisis in numbers of people diagnosed with dementia but also the crisis of the human-caused degradation of the planet itself, a type of cultural dementia. With I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird , Cerulean reminds us of the loving, necessary toil of tending to one place, one bird, one being at a time.
The natural world is the “sustaining body” into which we are born. In similar ways, we face not only a crisis in numbers of people diagnosed with dementia but also the crisis of the human-caused degradation of the planet itself, a type of cultural dementia. With I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird , Cerulean reminds us of the loving, necessary toil of tending to one place, one bird, one being at a time.
- GenresMemoirNonfiction
176 pages, Hardcover
Published August 1, 2020
4 people are currently reading
333 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
August 9, 2020
Susan Cerulean and I have been dear friends, compatriots, and life-travelers for over 30 years. We have co-edited books & been in the same writing group & taken family vacations together & so much more. We are both Southern women nature writers. So that is going to make me biased. I heard about this project as Susan was working on it, but I didn't read the manuscript until it was published & out to the public. Susan sent me an Advance Reading Copy but it was digital & I have a really tough time reading digital books. So I waited. The launch date was Aug. 1, 2020, and my copy arrived, and that was the first I'd seen it. I loved every minute of it. True, I enjoyed immersing myself in my friend's journey and I enjoyed reading about familiar places, people, and situations. More than that, however, the books manifests the decades that Susan has been writing & thinking about the earth & being a voice for wild things. She is really good at telling a story. Her sentences are beautiful, her language is spot-on. This story is about taking care of her elderly father and helping him navigate the lost dimensions of Alzheimer's disease, while at the same time being a steward for diminishing populations of shorebirds on the coast of the Florida Panhandle. Susan draws a link here between the environmental dementia that we as Americans and as world-citizens are suffering and the mind-destroying disease of dementia. If you love birds....if you want to learn more about dementia...if you have cared for or will care for an elderly parent...if you love the coast...if you love wildness...if you are a caretaker of any stripe...if you love Florida...you will enjoy this well-told and heart-rich story of a daughter's love for her father and a woman's love for the wild world.
July 7, 2020
Susan Cerulean’s forthcoming memoir, I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird, is one of those books I could not put down and hated to have end. I was bereft in leaving this story as it came to its final pages. Why? I’ll start with the title—the notion of being assigned rather than some other way of coming to a story—caught my immediate attention. How does a person get assigned a single bird? And who or what does the assigning? Something outside the self, or deep inside the self that calls to one? And who is this person who listens in this way, for the assignment, then accepts it! Already, the woman writing the story is someone I want to know and follow all the way home—wherever home is. I am going along. I want to always know her and hence, I am bereft when the memoir ends at the loss of connection with her, this woman who loves and will stand by the single bird forever—her father, her shorebird.
In tandem with the shorebird species she loves, she has a father, also a single bird in the way I understood her assignment, losing his capacity to connect, engage in the world, especially with his daughter—he is so vulnerable and requires more and more protection—like the shorebird she has been assigned. The usual line between species, in this way of writing, disappears. That, in itself a gift and perhaps, the essential truth communicated. The world is one, no divisions.
The world of dementia gradually overtakes the father, the father-daughter relationship. He is slowly leaving. The movement back and forth between this bird father and the shorebird species she loves and the strip of habitat she has been given to protect—come to be one bird…a single bird, the father and the shorebird and their habitats, and hence lives, threatened—being overtaken.
This remarkable weaving together of human and bird, attention, focus and protection is startling and carries the reader to deep reflection—what is this way of living and knowing and acting that is profoundly healing just in its articulation through the story—the one story, the single bird story. This is a memoir I carry now inside me as a question: What and whom might I be assigned or given? How does one find her way to this kind of living, this consciousness? I am carrying this question as a result of engaging with I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird.
In tandem with the shorebird species she loves, she has a father, also a single bird in the way I understood her assignment, losing his capacity to connect, engage in the world, especially with his daughter—he is so vulnerable and requires more and more protection—like the shorebird she has been assigned. The usual line between species, in this way of writing, disappears. That, in itself a gift and perhaps, the essential truth communicated. The world is one, no divisions.
The world of dementia gradually overtakes the father, the father-daughter relationship. He is slowly leaving. The movement back and forth between this bird father and the shorebird species she loves and the strip of habitat she has been given to protect—come to be one bird…a single bird, the father and the shorebird and their habitats, and hence lives, threatened—being overtaken.
This remarkable weaving together of human and bird, attention, focus and protection is startling and carries the reader to deep reflection—what is this way of living and knowing and acting that is profoundly healing just in its articulation through the story—the one story, the single bird story. This is a memoir I carry now inside me as a question: What and whom might I be assigned or given? How does one find her way to this kind of living, this consciousness? I am carrying this question as a result of engaging with I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird.
May 28, 2020
You must sit down and read this incandescently lyrical book. It will fill your heart with the love that pours off every page, for people and for the earth. This stunning memoir is an intertwined love letter from a daughter to her beloved father as he loses more and more of himself to Alzheimer’s disease, and from a deeply feeling naturalist to the world of wild birds and how they frame and color all of our lives. It’s also an honorable portrait of the self scrutiny of a woman whose race and class privileges make it possible for her to follow her calling as an environmental activist rather than take full time care of her declining father. The book traces several transformations. The daughter moves from the absolute assurance that her father can do/be better, to understanding that his disease is inexorable and terminal. She becomes first more involved in his care, then less as his needs skyrocket and his capacity to “be there” decreases. In her spiritual and professional world, she shifts from a relatively narrow focus on wild birds and their habitats to a profound and a encompassing commitment to bear witness to and attempt to save our fragile and precarious world. A “must read” for anyone who loves to let a book twine around their heart and haunt them for the rest of their days.
March 9, 2021
How Do We Protect What We Love?
TIKKUN Book Review – by Deena Metzger
By Deena Metzger | August 31, 2020
Credit: David Moynahan
I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird: A Daughter's Memoir
By Susan Cerulean
Photographs by David Moynahan
University of Georgia Press, August 2020
https://ugapress.org/author/susan-cer...
Any book by Susan Cerulean, writer, naturalist and activist, is a gift to all of us. Deeply trained by her heart, in exact observation of what she loves, Cerulean devotes herself to understanding the nature of what is before her in these times – the fragile nature of everything we love. She reminds us what intimate relationship is, whether the object is a bird or birds in Florida whose lives and futures are overwhelmed by humans overrunning the shore bird’s fragile territory, or her aging father, whose life is equally threatened by Alzheimer’s and his similar loss of his own territory and agency.
One would not imagine that these very distinct creatures would each inform us about the other, but to the contrary, Cerulean’s keen understanding of how our contemporary lives endanger all beings, allows us to follow the striking and undeniable parallels between the two. One way that Susan understands Alzheimer’s is as a disease of relentless and continuous loss. The analogue is the dementia of our world which instigates the relentless and continuous loss of one species after another until our lives will be as barren and unsustainable as someone in the last stages of dementia.
A single urgent question threads its way through the book: How can we take care of what we love? And this question devolves into another even more desperate: Can we take care of what we love? How might such caring manifest?
We need your support to bring the kind of analyses and information Tikkun provides.
Click here to make a tax-deductible contribution.
One response that can be gleaned from Cerulean’s inquiries when navigating the confusions, contradictions and traumas that confront both father and creatures, is the need to protect and provide home. And the great difficulty of doing so. What gives us certainty and security in our lives? What is our foundation? Upon what do we depend for comfort and a guarantee of a future? Home.
We follow Cerulean’s heartbreak as she realizes her father cannot stay in his home, cannot care for himself and none of his children, Cerulean included, can take him into their homes. We do not live alongside each other or even in the same cities or states. We do not live in villages. We no longer have the ability to take care of an aged parent with dementia. A patient with Alzheimer’s requires constant care, sometimes, as Cerulean discovers, more than one person at a time. And if the care is to be kind, then definitely more than one person to lift, dress and undress, bathe, take to the toilet, feed and reassure. Then after such an exhausting and repeating regime, remains the challenge of conversation, entertainment, affection, carrying the memories so life, even if waning, continues to have meaning and satisfaction.
Cerulean has a family to tend. And work that calls her and the natural world to protect, and she is a writer. She cannot care for her father in the ways her values, her heart, her expectations demand. These day almost everyone faces such dilemmas whether with an elder, a parent, siblings, children or friends and has to reckon with the institutional inadequacies despite our increasing dependence upon them. These personal challenges are equaled by the gross inadequacies of our laws, environmental and conservation organizations and government agencies to provide for the natural world whose demise we will not survive.
Cerulean cannot protect the birds whose habitat, whose homes are being overrun by humans and the effects of climate dissolution. The birds’ nesting area is the tiniest sliver of beach in a rising ocean. This is where they lay and tend their eggs. Storms take increasing territory back into their watery maws. The storms that are the consequences of our activities, our life styles heating the planet. As I write this, tropical storm Laura, strengthening over a very warm ocean, is threatening to make landfall with 120 mile an hour winds. Half a million people are being evacuated in advance, but how many birds?
In addition to the increasing numbers of natural disasters which affect the creatures inordinately, and their loss of habitat and sustenance, of home, the birds also suffer the on-going appearances of humans. We do not recognize and respect their territories We do not see their breeding grounds. We do not see these others who live among us or whose lands we trash. A man pulls his boat up on the sand without any awareness. The helpless squawking birds are not able to alert him to the harm he is doing.
“The man stands and unfolds his body from the boat. Nothing safe stands this tall on the sand …. A few of us tolerate the fear longer than others. Others jump in the air, swoop and turn “aa-a-raw, aa-a-raw” we cry. And we will, all of us, leave our refuge, which is no longer one, because the man in the boat is pushing against our sand which is the only place we can nest. …Our flightless chicks scurry for cover, and we cannot protect them, nor our eggs, which are now baking in the sun.”
Even Susan, when trying to fulfill a scientific demand to accurately accomplish a census, comes too close to the breeding birds, aware though she is, trespasses.
“I felt the anxiety of this pair who tended this nest, up on the hill.
… Our roles were so very different, I was the one who watched, who
wanted to know and they were the objects I studied and counted and
adored. Perhaps a relationship could be created if I agreed to curb
my desire to be close, to back away, and to honor their subjectivity. It
would be better if I honored their moral agency and the fact that they
were engaged in the serious business of continuing their kind on the
planet. I intuited the moment when I had nearly exhausted them with my
insistence on being in their space. I felt their signal, “Go away,” they said.”
And here is the dilemma. In Cerulean’s own words, she, even she, is asked to “Go away.” But if she does, she will not do what she has agreed, what her soul has agreed to do -- Bear Witness.
In a dream, Cerulean was assigned a single bird:
“Don’t take your eye off the chick-child and parent!
Care for them! Protect them.”
A single bird when what she wanted was a sturdy congregation. But the single, or the most fragile, the declining, the threatened, the disappearing, the ailing, is what we’re being given.
“Transforming our culture, our assumptions, our world view,
cosmology of separation, our economies, -- that is the single bird
we must heal.”
In her final chapter which she, thankfully, dares to call Saving the World, Cerulean writes, in words which refer equally to her father, our Mother Earth, and all the blessed creatures, “We must keep watch over these beautiful lives and pray for direction to inform our actions on their behalf and our own.”
“We must keep watch,” she says, “We!”
We must keep watch, pray for direction, and act.
TIKKUN Book Review – by Deena Metzger
By Deena Metzger | August 31, 2020
Credit: David Moynahan
I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird: A Daughter's Memoir
By Susan Cerulean
Photographs by David Moynahan
University of Georgia Press, August 2020
https://ugapress.org/author/susan-cer...
Any book by Susan Cerulean, writer, naturalist and activist, is a gift to all of us. Deeply trained by her heart, in exact observation of what she loves, Cerulean devotes herself to understanding the nature of what is before her in these times – the fragile nature of everything we love. She reminds us what intimate relationship is, whether the object is a bird or birds in Florida whose lives and futures are overwhelmed by humans overrunning the shore bird’s fragile territory, or her aging father, whose life is equally threatened by Alzheimer’s and his similar loss of his own territory and agency.
One would not imagine that these very distinct creatures would each inform us about the other, but to the contrary, Cerulean’s keen understanding of how our contemporary lives endanger all beings, allows us to follow the striking and undeniable parallels between the two. One way that Susan understands Alzheimer’s is as a disease of relentless and continuous loss. The analogue is the dementia of our world which instigates the relentless and continuous loss of one species after another until our lives will be as barren and unsustainable as someone in the last stages of dementia.
A single urgent question threads its way through the book: How can we take care of what we love? And this question devolves into another even more desperate: Can we take care of what we love? How might such caring manifest?
We need your support to bring the kind of analyses and information Tikkun provides.
Click here to make a tax-deductible contribution.
One response that can be gleaned from Cerulean’s inquiries when navigating the confusions, contradictions and traumas that confront both father and creatures, is the need to protect and provide home. And the great difficulty of doing so. What gives us certainty and security in our lives? What is our foundation? Upon what do we depend for comfort and a guarantee of a future? Home.
We follow Cerulean’s heartbreak as she realizes her father cannot stay in his home, cannot care for himself and none of his children, Cerulean included, can take him into their homes. We do not live alongside each other or even in the same cities or states. We do not live in villages. We no longer have the ability to take care of an aged parent with dementia. A patient with Alzheimer’s requires constant care, sometimes, as Cerulean discovers, more than one person at a time. And if the care is to be kind, then definitely more than one person to lift, dress and undress, bathe, take to the toilet, feed and reassure. Then after such an exhausting and repeating regime, remains the challenge of conversation, entertainment, affection, carrying the memories so life, even if waning, continues to have meaning and satisfaction.
Cerulean has a family to tend. And work that calls her and the natural world to protect, and she is a writer. She cannot care for her father in the ways her values, her heart, her expectations demand. These day almost everyone faces such dilemmas whether with an elder, a parent, siblings, children or friends and has to reckon with the institutional inadequacies despite our increasing dependence upon them. These personal challenges are equaled by the gross inadequacies of our laws, environmental and conservation organizations and government agencies to provide for the natural world whose demise we will not survive.
Cerulean cannot protect the birds whose habitat, whose homes are being overrun by humans and the effects of climate dissolution. The birds’ nesting area is the tiniest sliver of beach in a rising ocean. This is where they lay and tend their eggs. Storms take increasing territory back into their watery maws. The storms that are the consequences of our activities, our life styles heating the planet. As I write this, tropical storm Laura, strengthening over a very warm ocean, is threatening to make landfall with 120 mile an hour winds. Half a million people are being evacuated in advance, but how many birds?
In addition to the increasing numbers of natural disasters which affect the creatures inordinately, and their loss of habitat and sustenance, of home, the birds also suffer the on-going appearances of humans. We do not recognize and respect their territories We do not see their breeding grounds. We do not see these others who live among us or whose lands we trash. A man pulls his boat up on the sand without any awareness. The helpless squawking birds are not able to alert him to the harm he is doing.
“The man stands and unfolds his body from the boat. Nothing safe stands this tall on the sand …. A few of us tolerate the fear longer than others. Others jump in the air, swoop and turn “aa-a-raw, aa-a-raw” we cry. And we will, all of us, leave our refuge, which is no longer one, because the man in the boat is pushing against our sand which is the only place we can nest. …Our flightless chicks scurry for cover, and we cannot protect them, nor our eggs, which are now baking in the sun.”
Even Susan, when trying to fulfill a scientific demand to accurately accomplish a census, comes too close to the breeding birds, aware though she is, trespasses.
“I felt the anxiety of this pair who tended this nest, up on the hill.
… Our roles were so very different, I was the one who watched, who
wanted to know and they were the objects I studied and counted and
adored. Perhaps a relationship could be created if I agreed to curb
my desire to be close, to back away, and to honor their subjectivity. It
would be better if I honored their moral agency and the fact that they
were engaged in the serious business of continuing their kind on the
planet. I intuited the moment when I had nearly exhausted them with my
insistence on being in their space. I felt their signal, “Go away,” they said.”
And here is the dilemma. In Cerulean’s own words, she, even she, is asked to “Go away.” But if she does, she will not do what she has agreed, what her soul has agreed to do -- Bear Witness.
In a dream, Cerulean was assigned a single bird:
“Don’t take your eye off the chick-child and parent!
Care for them! Protect them.”
A single bird when what she wanted was a sturdy congregation. But the single, or the most fragile, the declining, the threatened, the disappearing, the ailing, is what we’re being given.
“Transforming our culture, our assumptions, our world view,
cosmology of separation, our economies, -- that is the single bird
we must heal.”
In her final chapter which she, thankfully, dares to call Saving the World, Cerulean writes, in words which refer equally to her father, our Mother Earth, and all the blessed creatures, “We must keep watch over these beautiful lives and pray for direction to inform our actions on their behalf and our own.”
“We must keep watch,” she says, “We!”
We must keep watch, pray for direction, and act.
May 16, 2020
Susan Cerulean uses lovely prose to connect the slow degradation of her father's mind to dementia with her stewardry of wild Florida shorebirds in the of context of man-made climate change. I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird deals with some "heavy" themes, but the reading of it is made easy by how eloquently Cerulean writes, rife in emotion and metaphor. The stories she relates of her father's time in care facilities and hospice are often both funny and heartbreaking; an 80+ year old man in pullups who is also dead set on marrying his caregiver.
Interspersed throughout the narrative are sections on Cerulean's experiences with the shorebirds in Florida during which she finds both comfort in the natural world and horror at the damage we have done and that we continue to do. In these dual narratives we find the overarching theme: that it is often better to start as the steward of one single thing and do whatever you can to see that you impart the most dignity and care possible.
**I was given a copy of this book by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. My thanks to University of Georgia Press**
Interspersed throughout the narrative are sections on Cerulean's experiences with the shorebirds in Florida during which she finds both comfort in the natural world and horror at the damage we have done and that we continue to do. In these dual narratives we find the overarching theme: that it is often better to start as the steward of one single thing and do whatever you can to see that you impart the most dignity and care possible.
**I was given a copy of this book by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. My thanks to University of Georgia Press**
August 30, 2021
First, I’d say 5 stars on the beautiful descriptive writing of the Florida shores and birds. I really loved being taken along and could see everything so beautifully in my mind’s eye. Really lovely! The author’s passion was evident and her knowledge exemplary. If you don’t know Florida this book is a nice introduction to the spaces we are less famous for and the ones we native, nature lovers treasure most.
The drawn parallels between a dying parent a dying nature were a tad forced, I understand the other comments on that but I disagree about that being a negative necessarily. It was a means of explanation and it was appropriate for the author. I didn’t think it detracted. I’d say 4 stars on this aspect.
Why the low 3 stars? I guess the book just rubbed me wrong on one point. The issue of why we don’t care more. It’s my belief that we collectively don’t value nature enough to radically change because we value money. We almost have to, especially in the Westernized world. Our lives that were once so connected to the natural world for survival, peace and happiness are now connected to the world of money for the same. This has fundamentally changed us. I understand that without a natural world we die out and money becomes irrelevant. The book suggests we need to get to the bottom of why we do not care or act. But it fell short of addressing what I see as a bigger root problem than the individual. I wanted to learn how poverty, capitalism, and wealth are interfering. The hints were in there but I was left dangling. Are we pressuring a person to do what collectively as a society we won’t or can’t?
Just one person’s thoughts. And after a great discussion on this book I’m more inclined to say this probably wasn’t the point of this book. Maybe her next will tackle this idea?!
The drawn parallels between a dying parent a dying nature were a tad forced, I understand the other comments on that but I disagree about that being a negative necessarily. It was a means of explanation and it was appropriate for the author. I didn’t think it detracted. I’d say 4 stars on this aspect.
Why the low 3 stars? I guess the book just rubbed me wrong on one point. The issue of why we don’t care more. It’s my belief that we collectively don’t value nature enough to radically change because we value money. We almost have to, especially in the Westernized world. Our lives that were once so connected to the natural world for survival, peace and happiness are now connected to the world of money for the same. This has fundamentally changed us. I understand that without a natural world we die out and money becomes irrelevant. The book suggests we need to get to the bottom of why we do not care or act. But it fell short of addressing what I see as a bigger root problem than the individual. I wanted to learn how poverty, capitalism, and wealth are interfering. The hints were in there but I was left dangling. Are we pressuring a person to do what collectively as a society we won’t or can’t?
Just one person’s thoughts. And after a great discussion on this book I’m more inclined to say this probably wasn’t the point of this book. Maybe her next will tackle this idea?!
January 16, 2021
Cerulean's elegant memoir is about specific people, and caregiving for an individual person, but it's also speaking to all life on this planet, and the importance of caring for it.
February 19, 2021
Susan Cerulean, a naturalist, attempts to use her father’s failing body and mind as a metaphor for the earth’s deterioration due to human consumption and abuse. She depicts her father transforming from a man who had vitality and an intellectual, protective, and fun-loving spirit to one who gradually loses control over his language and bodily functions but never loses his essence. She also uses the title as a metaphor for her father being birdlike, as in the informal dictionary definition: a person of a specified kind or character. Her father is a pretty tough old bird.
One of the themes that will stay with me after reading this book is how the author discussed the concept of aging—humans aging and the earth aging—with and without undue interference. Through anecdotes about growing up with her father and relating to her father as an adult, she showed aging as the natural process nature intended. She emphasized the critical care and nurturing required for the human body and the Earth. She talks about the loss of life signaled with each new condominium complex and strip mall. She says, “A quarter-acre of swamp traded for a dollar store. Forty acres of pine woods buried under a Walmart. A hip fractured on asphalt. What am I here for if I can’t save or protect a single place or thing? Or Person?”
The pages of the book are replete with her admiration and love for her father. The author describes her love for her father growing deeper and maturing even though she struggles with his having worked for The International Nickel Company. This company contributed to the “resource extraction that was destroying so much land and water and wildlife.” Cerulean chooses her words carefully and creates interesting prose when she admits that she didn’t mean to make her father a scapegoat in her writing in defense of the natural world. When she outlined human abuses to nature and her father’s complicity, it is disclosed as another family secret. She quotes Deena Metzger as having said, “A person can be wonderfully good, generous, kind, and still operate within the cultural machinery that destroys the Earth.” Her use of this quote is a somewhat detached acceptance of her father’s worth despite her disagreement with his chosen career’s role in destroying the land that she is expending her energy preventing.
Cerulean speaks of Disney and other Florida theme parks as a detriment to the state's natural wonders, which she enjoys so much more. She also talks about objectifying her father's relationship with and condition to study him the way she studies birds. Her expertise as a writer did not completely convince me of the metaphor of the earth as a bird’s nest for human beings. For the most part, I found her writing style to focus on anecdotal reflections rather than building a cohesive story. She conveyed a passion for birds and their habitats and a desire to protect Florida’s wildlife. She also imparted a genuine concern for her father’s well-being and the caretakers with whom she entrusted his life. She did not have the same optimism or confidence in the humans who are caretakers of the earth.
https://quipsandquotes.net/?p=465
One of the themes that will stay with me after reading this book is how the author discussed the concept of aging—humans aging and the earth aging—with and without undue interference. Through anecdotes about growing up with her father and relating to her father as an adult, she showed aging as the natural process nature intended. She emphasized the critical care and nurturing required for the human body and the Earth. She talks about the loss of life signaled with each new condominium complex and strip mall. She says, “A quarter-acre of swamp traded for a dollar store. Forty acres of pine woods buried under a Walmart. A hip fractured on asphalt. What am I here for if I can’t save or protect a single place or thing? Or Person?”
The pages of the book are replete with her admiration and love for her father. The author describes her love for her father growing deeper and maturing even though she struggles with his having worked for The International Nickel Company. This company contributed to the “resource extraction that was destroying so much land and water and wildlife.” Cerulean chooses her words carefully and creates interesting prose when she admits that she didn’t mean to make her father a scapegoat in her writing in defense of the natural world. When she outlined human abuses to nature and her father’s complicity, it is disclosed as another family secret. She quotes Deena Metzger as having said, “A person can be wonderfully good, generous, kind, and still operate within the cultural machinery that destroys the Earth.” Her use of this quote is a somewhat detached acceptance of her father’s worth despite her disagreement with his chosen career’s role in destroying the land that she is expending her energy preventing.
Cerulean speaks of Disney and other Florida theme parks as a detriment to the state's natural wonders, which she enjoys so much more. She also talks about objectifying her father's relationship with and condition to study him the way she studies birds. Her expertise as a writer did not completely convince me of the metaphor of the earth as a bird’s nest for human beings. For the most part, I found her writing style to focus on anecdotal reflections rather than building a cohesive story. She conveyed a passion for birds and their habitats and a desire to protect Florida’s wildlife. She also imparted a genuine concern for her father’s well-being and the caretakers with whom she entrusted his life. She did not have the same optimism or confidence in the humans who are caretakers of the earth.
https://quipsandquotes.net/?p=465
October 27, 2020
I had the opportunity to buy this book and attend a webinar where the author and her friend Janisse Ray (Ecology of a Cracker Childhood) discussed the environment, life, and of course this book. I really enjoyed the discussion and receiving and reading the book! Thank you Avid Bookshop in Athens, Georgia.
This book in summation is lovely, delicate, and handles hard topics with feminine essence. With that being said, dementia, Alzheimer's, cultural dementia, loss of habitat and health in general of all beings, whether discussing people or other creatures' lives, is at the crux of this book. It's wonderful when a writer can consume a theme and reinvent it for the reader. In this case, it's the parallel between an aging father's experiences in slowly dying from Alzheimer's disease, and the earth slowly dying from 'human biomass' as a disease concept. Love!
I adore books like this because they fit into bridging the gap between two very important human constructs - science and art - biology and literature. Can't get any better to expand the mind and brain than to make connections between seemingly opposite subjects and making them correlate. Oftentimes, books of this nature can be 'touchy feely' but that comes with the territory of an empathetic writer and the topics are very emotionally moving.
Overall, this book is filled with insight, encouragement, and a handful of hollarings for awareness and habit changes. We can't all go back to living like Neanderthals but we can learn, adapt, and control our wanton desires and lazy thinking that we can do whatever and whenever we want. The requirement in this country is DISCIPLINE. We are the most undisciplined and unconscientious group of humans the world has today (that's my opinion).
Thank you Susan and Janisse.
This book in summation is lovely, delicate, and handles hard topics with feminine essence. With that being said, dementia, Alzheimer's, cultural dementia, loss of habitat and health in general of all beings, whether discussing people or other creatures' lives, is at the crux of this book. It's wonderful when a writer can consume a theme and reinvent it for the reader. In this case, it's the parallel between an aging father's experiences in slowly dying from Alzheimer's disease, and the earth slowly dying from 'human biomass' as a disease concept. Love!
I adore books like this because they fit into bridging the gap between two very important human constructs - science and art - biology and literature. Can't get any better to expand the mind and brain than to make connections between seemingly opposite subjects and making them correlate. Oftentimes, books of this nature can be 'touchy feely' but that comes with the territory of an empathetic writer and the topics are very emotionally moving.
Overall, this book is filled with insight, encouragement, and a handful of hollarings for awareness and habit changes. We can't all go back to living like Neanderthals but we can learn, adapt, and control our wanton desires and lazy thinking that we can do whatever and whenever we want. The requirement in this country is DISCIPLINE. We are the most undisciplined and unconscientious group of humans the world has today (that's my opinion).
Thank you Susan and Janisse.
November 1, 2020
A beautiful memoir of caring for a parent with dementia. The author compares the plight of our planet with her father's dementia--both deteriorating helplessly. The emphasis, however, is on her father, Robert, as he declines first in New Jersey under his wife's care. When his wife dies suddenly, author Susan Cerulean moves him to Florida to be closer to her. At first, he flourishes in the new environment, but gradually, time and the disease take their toll.
In this compassionate account, Cerulean frankly describes the frustration of caring for a patient with dementia, but always remembers that as heartbreaking as it is to care for a loved one, what they are experiencing is far worse. Although there is sadness, the book is primarily one of hope and beauty. #IHaveBeenAssignedTheSingleBird #NetGalley
In this compassionate account, Cerulean frankly describes the frustration of caring for a patient with dementia, but always remembers that as heartbreaking as it is to care for a loved one, what they are experiencing is far worse. Although there is sadness, the book is primarily one of hope and beauty. #IHaveBeenAssignedTheSingleBird #NetGalley
July 30, 2020
Cerulean is very knowledgable about migration patterns of coastal birds. She speaks to this and gives delicate, yet sharp visuals of her love for nature. The same can be said of her descriptions of watching her father slowly deteriorate from his illness. One that will eventually kill him.
She weaves the two topics into one, and even though it's sad, she also gives a beautiful story about watching an ailing parent slip away.
I was moved several times by her way of writing. It's so hard to watch a parent die, and I imagine, even more so to write about it, and be immersed in that feeling for a long enough time to focus and tell the story.
I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird publishes 8.1.2020.
5/5 Stars
She weaves the two topics into one, and even though it's sad, she also gives a beautiful story about watching an ailing parent slip away.
I was moved several times by her way of writing. It's so hard to watch a parent die, and I imagine, even more so to write about it, and be immersed in that feeling for a long enough time to focus and tell the story.
I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird publishes 8.1.2020.
5/5 Stars
August 24, 2020
Braiding narratives of her father's dementia with that of the loss of habitat that endangers bird life in and around coastal Florida, Susan Cerulean's memoir is an insightful contemplation of the state of the world, laced with a fabulously rich narrative. "How is the dementia we are inflicting on our world similar to a dementing illness in a single human brain?" asks Cerulean. Manmade climate crisis, mindless urban development, elderly care, disadvantaged labour force, and contemporary American politics are some of the topics Cerulean touches upon in her book. Deeply felt and observed, if this thoughtful slim book provokes debates at least at dinner tables, it'll be a success for the author.
PS: received ARC from Netgalley for an honest review.
PS: received ARC from Netgalley for an honest review.
May 19, 2021
This Alzheimer’s memoir takes us through Cerulean’s years of taking care of her father, who has dementia and other problems. We get a close look at nursing home care and the struggles to maintain her own life while keep close watch on her father’s. At the same time, Cerulean is building a career in wildlife conservation and nature writing, specifically about the sea birds where she lives in Florida. Throughout the book, she leaves the story about her father to take us on birding expeditions. She tries very hard to tie climate change and the impending loss of our planet with the loss of her father. For me, the connection doesn’t quite work. But she writes well. I was right there with her in the nursing home, and I know a lot more about sea birds now.
March 14, 2022
Beautiful and heart-wrenching at times. Susan writes with such grace and specificity about her father's slow demise from dementia and her expanding love not just for him but for the caregivers. She weaves in her field work as a bird biologist in ways that give new insights to the plight of our planet at human hands. The book is a call to wake us up all from a dementia of our own making--and to treat the earth with reverence--and never to stop caring.
December 20, 2020
Rounded up to 5
A lovely memoir blending the last years of the author’s father’s life, dementia and caregiving struggles, with her life’s work an an environmental activist and educator
She monitors nesting sites of shore birds in Florida, not something that I had much interest in, but she skillfully drew me in
A lovely memoir blending the last years of the author’s father’s life, dementia and caregiving struggles, with her life’s work an an environmental activist and educator
She monitors nesting sites of shore birds in Florida, not something that I had much interest in, but she skillfully drew me in
December 21, 2020
This is another in Cerulean's canon, just as beautifully written as ever, and wonderfully touching. As I finished, I was almost in tears. No one expresses better what should be everyone's passion for the earth and its creatures. And the memoir of her father's slow decline as he battled dementia is both a practical primer for the rest of us and a memorial to a beloved parent. Highly recommended.
February 9, 2021
While this book covered two heartbreaking topics, environmental advocacy and the slow decline of her aging father with dementia, the two topics felt like the author tried to create too many parallels between the two. The author would often go from one topic to the other with little to no transition making it feel choppy.
July 9, 2021
I loved this memoir. Cerulean wove her work in environmentalism with her experience in caring for her ailing father. As I look to the possibility of caring for my own parents in the future, Susan offered insight and practical information on how to balance her own life, work, and desire to care for family --in a captivating way that kept me interested and inspired.
January 28, 2022
"We must linger longer, watching the beautiful things, watch them with exquisite attention, praying that their spirits will inform our actions on their behalf and our own."
Many thanks to the author. This is the second book of hers that I've read and both have encouraged and inspired me to pay attention and to write.
Many thanks to the author. This is the second book of hers that I've read and both have encouraged and inspired me to pay attention and to write.
September 21, 2020
Liked it found some of her times with her father difficult to read
February 25, 2023
I can’t stop thinking about this book. I first noticed it tucked under the arm of a woman I had never met. I was attracted to the cover, as a person who loves birds and birding. The woman gave me a brief overview, and I realized it was a must read. I had been working through how to approach my mother’s journey into dementia. Susan’s writing is beautiful. There were so many passages and descriptions that would capture me. I would re-read them several times and just sit with them. I’ll admit; I originally gave the book three stars. I finished the book deflated. But that’s what dementia does. It deflates you. It makes you question your relationships and your sanity. It also reorganizes how you spend your energy and whether or not you can take pleasure in favorite activities again. I changed my rating higher after I got over my dementia hangover and remembered all of the wonderful moments I had with Susan throughout her shared journey. I was reminded of all of my wonderful birding outings with my parents as well as my own wonderings about how we protect and celebrate these precious birds but also preserve our relationships with those who made us love the birds in the first place. Dementia/Alzheimer’s is different in each person it affects but presents the same challenges for families and friends of those with the disease. Thank you for sharing your father’s story and your journey as his daughter, a sibling, a wife, and a mom, Susan. The more we share our stories, the more we realize we aren’t alone. Thank God for those who have shared their stories with me. May I be so brave to share mine so it helps others.
January 18, 2023
(Print) This was a beautiful story of a daughter’s love for her father and for her environmental woek.
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