Walking the Night Road: Coming of Age in Grief, by Alexandra Butler
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Walking the Night Road: Coming of Age in Grief, by Alexandra Butler
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The house looked as if she'd brushed it over with a hurried hand. Things were open―drawers, cans, and closets. A pile of newspapers fanned out across the floor by the front door, and still I did not wonder. She must have dropped them as she ran, I thought. My mother was often late. But had I stopped to look, I would have seen the fear in the way the house had settled―a footstool that lay on its side, several books that had fallen from their shelves. When you count back, you can see a story from the end. I like that―the seemingly natural narrative that forms this way. With the end in my hand, the story becomes mine. I can have it all make sense, or I can lose my mind like she lost hers―like I lost her. But I can have my story.
Walking the Night Road speaks to the experience of caring for a loved one with a terminal illness and the difficulties of encountering death. Alexandra Butler, daughter of the Pulitzer Prize–winning gerontologist Robert N. Butler and respected social worker and psychotherapist Myrna Lewis, composes a lyrical yet unsparing portrait of caring for her mother during her sudden, quick decline from brain cancer. Her rich account shares the strains of caregiving on both the provider and the person receiving care and recognizes the personal and professional sacrifices caregivers must make to fulfill the role.
More than a memoir of dying and grief, Butler's account also tests many of the theories her parents pioneered in their work on healthy aging. Authors of such seminal works as Love and Sex After Sixty, Butler's parents were forced to rethink many of the tenets they lived by while Myrna was incapacitated, and Butler's father found himself relying heavily on his daughter to provide his wife's care. Butler's poignant and unflinching story is therefore a rare examination of the intimate aspects of aging and death experienced by practitioners who suddenly find themselves in the difficult position of the clients they once treated.
Walking the Night Road: Coming of Age in Grief, by Alexandra Butler- Amazon Sales Rank: #1123744 in Books
- Published on: 2015-06-30
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.20" h x .50" w x 5.40" l, .58 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 184 pages
Review
Alexandra Butler's account of her parents' deaths is engaging and affecting. Boomers and their children will learn much from this memoir as they themselves approach the finitude of life.
(Andrew Achenbaum, Professor of Social Work at the University of Houston)An honest look at marriage, aging, happiness, and survival―both wise and funny. You will walk the Night Road too.
(Barbara Walters)A detailed, beautifully written, insightful account of the process of dying and of living―it's difficult to put down. Butler is able to use her words to breathe life into the people she is writing about and provide the reader with an ability to enter their lives as observers who can nearly feel the sun, shudder in the cold, and hear the creak of the floors.
(Jeanette Takamura, Dean, Columbia School of Social Work)This book is Ms. Butler's passionate account of her fight to help her mother, the author of works on mental health and aging, Myrna Lewis, in her battle against a malignant brain tumor. The depth of her grief and her fury against a foe she knew must win is palpable on every page.
(Peter Pouncey, Author of Rules for Old Men Waiting)Alexandra Butler's memoir of the last year-and-a-half of her mother's life is a searing, exquisitely written, brilliant work. Its honesty, insight, and poetic sensitivity left us deeply moved, far more so than anything else we've read in many years. It is truly a magnificent accomplishment.
(Lawrence K. Grossman, Former president of NBC News and PBS)I read this book in one sitting last night and it is really remarkable. She captures, a la Virginia Woolf, the inner voice and experience of illness, death and grief in a way I have not seen before. Lots of talent there.
(Diane Meier, Director of Center to Advance Palliative Care)The vivid, expressive intelligence of the writing made the exploding consequences of Myrna's cancer invade my mind in ways that were deeply moving and instructive. I was struck by the author's skill as a writer from the devastating start of the book, in which Myrna has already crossed the threshold into a world from which she can't return. It reads like a nightmare at first, but then settles into the pit of the stomach as not nightmare at all, not even the cultural nightmare of cancer as dread incarnate, but as our everyday, waking reality transformed into a bizarre parallel universe. Butler has composed a particular and telling vignette with implications beyond her immediate circumstances―a tragi-comic subtext to the way many of us are driven to organize our lives in unbroken chains of projects.
(Joan Retallack, John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Humanities, Bard College)I read it in one sitting. I laughed; I cried my eyes out; I related the whole way. And the beauty of it is that my mother does not have cancer. No one has cancer. It's the relationship and the feelings, deep to the core. This is not about cancer. It's about people, about the relationship between the people and the journey. I bet that people will relate no matter what kind of death or loss.
(Joan Siffert, Senior Vice President of Development at Gilda's Club)Beautifully and skillfully written.
(Rabbi Harold S. Kushner)Beautiful, heartbreaking and incisive, Butler's memoir is a brutally honest retelling of her mother's tragic battle against cancer. Her words go beyond just grief, they inspire a greater understanding of what it means to be a child, and how the lines that define familial roles are often more complex and messy than they seem. A child is never just a child. A parent never just a parent. Walking the Night Road is a cathartic tribute to anyone who has ever lost a parent.
(Will Reiser, Screenwriter, 50/50)Butler has written a moving and powerful book about the unlikely blessings that a death can bring. Anyone who has lost a loved one―or indeed anyone who has unwillingly embarked on an adventure only to find themselves in a better place―will enjoy this account. She reminds us all that hardships can sometimes be gifts wrapped in pain. We just need to see them that way.
(Dan Buettner, Author, The Blue Zones Solution: Eating and Living Like the World's Healthiest People )Butler gives an exceptionally full-bodied description of family life, with its enduring connections, weaknesses, cruelties and warmth.
(Terri Apter Times Literary Supplement)Very well written, organized and presented, Walking the Night Road is... extraordinary and highly recommended.
(The Midwest Book Review)About the Author
Alexandra Butler recently received her MSW from the Columbia University School of Social Work.
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Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful. This is a deeply moving and beautifully written memoir By Emma This is a deeply moving and beautifully written memoir. Its main focus is the author's grief while her mother is dying of brain cancer and in the wake of both her parents' deaths. However, the book also illuminates Butler's passage into maturity, which means developing her own understanding of her parents as opposed to living within the perspective of her mother, with whom she had a symbiotic relationship. Ultimately, Butler develops the ability to appraise and celebrate her parents' humanity instead of placing one or the other on a pedestal. This allows her enough distance to render her parents--their lives and deaths--and her own inner landscape clearly and artfully. While the narrative is personal and highly specific it offers tremendous insight into the grieving process--a nearly universal experience at its core.Butler's prose are lyrical and poetic but also economical. (I'm excited to read her poetry as well!) Writing about illness and death can so easily become leaden; however, while this books is devastating at times, there is levity and beauty in its pages. I absolutely recommend Walking the Night Road, especially for those who are grappling with loss. Butler's willingness to expose the complexity of her own grief and her compassion (for herself and others) are her greatest gifts to her readers. I am grateful to have received them.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful. Mourning... By Jill Meyer Everybody grieves their dead and every period of grieving is different. Alexandra Butler lost both of her parents from disease in a span of a few years, and writes about her parents and her grief for them in her memoir, "Walking the Night Road: Coming of Age in Grief". It's a fairly interesting book, but rather awkwardly written.Alexandra's parents - Dr Robert Butler and Dr Myrna Lewis - were leaders in the field of aging and the final days of life. Lewis was Butler's second wife - he had three daughters from his first marriage - and their daughter, Alexandra, was a "late-in-life" baby. She grew up in the midst of both her parents work and their lives together. She was much closer to her mother, in whose shadow she grew up. Her relationship with her father was a bit more problematical; he was old enough to be her grandfather and they did not seem to be close until his last illness and death. I caught glimpses of the relationship between Myrna and Bob, but the resentment Myrna showed Bob was difficult to construct other than seeming to be resentment at his greater fame in their chosen work and detachment from his home life.Alexandra Butler was in her mid-twenties when her mother was diagnosed with a brain tumor. She lived with her parents and was her mother's main help until a nurse - also named "Myrna" - was hired to take over her care. After her mother's death, Alexandra went through a protracted mourning period where it seems she both mourned and tried to figure out her mother's life and her place in it. Then her father became sick with a form of leukemia and died. Losing two parents is difficult enough without having a strong personal identity to help sustain yourself.Now maybe "personal identity" is important here. In the book, I never really figured out just "who" Alexandra Butler was. Yes, "daughter of", and "half-sister of", and, eventually, "wife and mother of", but in the book she seems so non-existent in her own right. After receiving a diagnosis of depression, she began taking Zoloft, which seemed to help her.Butler's writing is stream-of-conscience and it is not tightly written. Maybe memoir writers are allowed a bit of bit of wavering in their writing; after all, they're writing about their emotions. But Butler's book is too wandering. Maybe a lot of it should have remained within the confines of a therapist's office.I had high hopes for the book after reading an excerpt from it in the New York Times last week. However, this book - and the subject - are highly personal and other readers may enjoy it.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful. Reading this book was a powerful experience. By Callie Thompson I found this book to be vital. A beautifully written, tightly-paced book that I couldn't put down. It brought me so completely into her world that I felt I was able to experience with her what it feels like to lose a parent. After reading the book, I was moved to stay more connected to both of my parents, a gift from the book that I didn't expect. Thank you to the author for being so vulnerable and having the graceful ability to write about this experience in a way that was simultaneously accessible and also transformative. I'm grateful to have read this and look forward to more from this powerful writer.
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