I’ll Close My Eyes (But I Won’t Be Asleep)

Delusion, dementia or discourse? A daughter insists on the latter and, with the threads of her mother’s narratives, crafts for them a raft that will take them to the brink.Moving, insightful and inspiring, I’ll Close My Eyes (But I Won’t Be Asleep) is an honest and compassionate account of a mother’s struggle to face death, and a daughter’s struggle to accompany and help her. Each of them pressed to their limits, mother and daughter, alone and together, draw on deep resources of body, mind and spirit as life pushes them where they had no intention of going. In a new and ambivalent intimacy shaped by memory and grief, violence and rage, words are the vessel that saves them.Adler bears witness to the power of language and love as mother and daughter face life’s final challenge-revealing what, for most of us, remains hidden and unheard.There are words one can’t say, our mouths can’t shape. Consonants without vowels. God’s name in Hebrew. Soundless. Deep. So you doubt what you hear. Like when I wasn’t expecting anything and heard it.The day her mother died, Adler heard something like a distant wind rushing-an incoming tide.I heard it, and having heard it, I want to remember: what I heard was no tinkling but an oncoming roar. And now that I know, I want not to become deaf and dead to it - to say what I heard, even knowing that the more I try to hold in words what I knew, the more what was true slips like water through cupped hands. You see, I’ve already almost forgotten. Like a mother, after giving birth, forgets the labor.Mothers and daughters are severed from each other at least twice: once at birth and again at the end of life -the second cutting of the 'umbilical-chord.' In this compelling memoir, Adler sounds the intimate, heartbreaking, and sometimes humorous, end-oflife dialogue, an 'umbili-chord' in the mother and daughter relationship.These conversations, unlike anything I’d shared with her before, shocked me. I was glad they happened only when we were alone together. I’d never even thought these things I heard us say, didn’t know where they came from. But since they seemed to make sense to her, I kept inviting her to speak. She’d say something, I’d listen, say something back; we were together in words. As if what we said to each other arose, not from our own learning or experience, but some underlying chord that included our voices but was bigger, spoke through them, as if the sound of the ocean were encoded in the sounds of the rain.I’ll Close My Eyes (But I Won’t Be Asleep) is a useful story -useful for anyone torn by conflicting desires and demands, and struggling to give care.