The Long Hello

Memory, My Mother, and Me

By: Cathie Borrie

Narrated by: Jill Tucker, Cathie Borrie

Length: 3 hrs and 32 mins

Publisher's summary

A powerful, ground-shifting account of caring for a parent with Alzheimer's, about which Maya Angelou exclaimed, "Joy!"

Since Cathie Borrie delivered her keynote performance at the World Alzheimer's Day event sponsored by the Community and Access Programs of the Museum of Modern Art, her self-published manuscript has won rapturous praise from noted writers and Alzheimer's experts alike, from Maya Angelou, Lisa Genova, and Molly Peacock to Dr. Bill Thomas; Jed A. Levine of the Alzheimer's Association, NYC; and Meryl Comer of the Geoffrey Beene Foundation Alzheimer's Initiative. Now it is available to the general public for the first time in a trade edition.

The Long Hello distills the seven years the author spent caring for her mother into a pause-resisting memoir that offers insight into the "altering world of the dementia mind". During that time Borrie recorded brief conversations she had with her mother that revealed the transformations within - and sometimes yielded an almost Zen-like poetry. She includes selections from them in chapters about her experience that are as evocative as diary entries. Her mother was the emotional pillar and sometime breadwinner in a home touched by a birth father's alcoholism, a brother's early death, divorce, and a stepfather's remoteness. In Borrie's spare prose, her mother's story becomes a family's story as well a deeply loving portrait that embraces life.

©2015 Cathie Borrie; First US Edition 2016 (P)2016 Audible, Inc.

From the heart

A beautiful story of love, loss and survival. So many of our generation have navigated these waters. My own grandmother told us, “ You are such nice people, I wish my own family would come to visit me.”

Melancholic Story

While some have panned it because of the back and forth and difficulty following, this is a poignant story of a person losing their mother, not just once, but two times. The chaos of the timeline is all too familiar to anyone who has cared for a person with Alzheimer’s. Not just visitors, but spent many hours in a day and over the course of years. What was striking to me is maybe the author is attempting to come to terms with her own life; the guilt, loss of a childhood, her brother, etc. is so telling. A good read but much different than expected.

Eavesdropping

It's a matter of perspective, I realized; but I feel as if I've eavesdropped on a very private conversation with no one in particular. It comes across as a whispered after thought. To painful to be specific, it's like the burning ache of a long tattoo, too specific to be painless.