The Road to Keringet as reviewed by Tom Sandborn in the Vancouver Sun and reprinted in the Victoria
Times Colonist.
We would all like to
have memories of our lives survive past our death, I suppose, and one of the
places that can happen is in the memories of our family and friends. For a few,
the remembered stories go public in the form of printed memoirs and
autobiography. This is not always good news for readers or other family
members. But a new book by Maggie Ziegler, a BC psychotherapist, is an
outstanding and luminous example of what can be accomplished when memory and
family reminiscence are served by shapely prose and a serene, compassionate
retrospective view.
“When I am gone I
want you to write everything down very quickly. Before you forget,” Zeigler’s
mother Mary said to her as she began a painful descent into dementia and her
eventual death. “Write down what I’m saying.”
The daughter’s 2012 book, The Road to Keringet is the
result of that end-of-life commission. It opens as the mother and daughter are
struggling to come to terms with Mary’s illness and care needs as dementia
erodes her memory and competence, and reflects back on the mixed joys and
sorrows of the mother’s life, weaving together the family back story (which includes Mary’s growing up working
class in England and meeting and marrying her German Jewish husband Wolfgang in
Africa during WWII) with a clear eyed and painfully honest portrait of a
complex marriage that began in hope and romance, and broke apart in mid life
bitterness.
The author, a BC-based
psychotherapist who specializes in trauma intervention, draws not only on notes from her last
conversations with her mother but also
on the contents of innumerable boxes filled with diaries, journals, letters and
newspaper and magazine clippings her mother had preserved from her quietly
adventurous life in England, Kenya and Canada. Some of the clipped material and
correspondence reflected Mary’s own modest success as a free lance writer, and
the more personal material illuminated much that had been opaque until then for
the daughter- the childhood sorrows that shaped her mother’s character, the
nature of her parents’ attempts to sustain an unconventional open marriage
during the conformist 1950s, the tensions and heartbreak that drove them apart
as they wandered from Kenya to the UK and then to Canada, and the central role that writing played in
the mother’s life. It also led to a final tender and absolutely believable
reconciliation between the author and her mother. Ziegler’s account of that
moment of forgiveness and resolution at her mother’s deathbed is a magnificent
set piece and worth the price of admission to the book in itself.
In a publishing world
that can often seem over-crowded with memoirs of family grief, a new book needs
to do something remarkable to distinguish it from all the other books of
clamorous, insistent memory on offer. Everyone has a story, and nearly everyone
has complicated, often painful aspects to their memories of family life. An
aspiring memoirist has to persuade the reader that she or he has something new
to tell, and that the telling is done in graceful enough prose to make the time
spent on the story worthwhile.
The Road to Keringet more than meets that challenge.
Maggie Ziegler’s tender and tough minded account of her parents’ marriage and
early years is interwoven with a breathtakingly honest and unsparing account of
what it was like for their grown children to face into the gathering darkness
together with their mother. This aspect of The Road to Keringet will be
of keen interest to the many Canadian families who are living through the
torments that attend seeing loved ones eroded by the cruel tides of Alzheimer’s
and other dementias.
But whether or not our parents are suffering from dementia
or not, all adult children face the task of coming to terms with our parents in
all their fallible humanity and making a kind of peace with the rigors and sorrows
of childhood. Perhaps informed by her work as a therapist, Ziegler writes beautifully
on this topic. She is unsparing in her honesty as she chronicles the ebb and
flow of her good will for her mother and the waves of sometimes agonizing
childhood memories that Mary’s suffering evokes in her. She doesn’t edit out
the moments of impatience or self regard that intrude on her time with her
mother, or the guilt that tortures her when she is a continent away from the
care home where Mary is enduring her last days.
Ziegler’s text is notable not only for its lucid and
sometimes lyrical prose but for its principled refusal to fall into either of
the twinned, seductive temptations that
preside over every family memoir- sentimentality on one hand and mean spirited
“Mommie Dearest” style denunciation of parents and siblings on the other. The
author has the courage to view the sometimes unlovely particulars of family
life and the aging body directly and unflinchingly, and the prose skills that
render what she observes in full and evocative detail. All is viewed with every
wart visible, but illuminated by compassion and serenity.
Ziegler’s book, resonant with grace and compassion, will
move and inform the reader. Highly recommended to parents and children,
therapists and clients, those who cherish their families and those who find
them sources of profound dismay. Readers would be well advised to travel the
Road to Keringet.
Tom Sandborn lives and writes in Vancouver . He welcomes feedback and story or
review suggestions at tos@infinet.net
