In her memoir, I'll Be Seeing You, novelist Elizabeth Berg (The Confession Club) bravely maps an intimate story of growing older while helping her aging, elderly parents navigate a fraught, reluctant move from their beloved home in Minnesota to a nearby assisted-living community. The residence change is necessitated by Berg's 89-year-old father's descent into dementia en route to Alzheimer's disease. Her mother is staunch in her resistance to the move and to acquiescing to the progression of her husband's infirmity, as well as her own growing list of limitations.
The pain of loss underscores every aspect of this beautifully written memoir that unravels over a period of one year, starting in autumn 2010. Berg offers tender, moving lessons learned--about herself and her parents--as she, her sister and a long-distance brother step in to aid a very stressful transition. Love and compassion overpower emotional minefields and despair as Berg comes to grips with--and becomes peacemaker for--stubbornness and pride exhibited by both mother and father. However, Berg shows great respect, genuine affection and admiration for her parents and their 69 years of successful marriage, while also proclaiming: "I failed in my marriage, and I have failed in relationships since, including the one I am in now." She threads such revelatory admissions throughout. Berg shares unabashed, personal truths and feelings and often grapples, as a dutiful daughter, with exposing her parents' foibles and flaws. Readers will relish Berg's courageous, forthright storytelling as it sharpens the acuity and emotional heft of this deeply moving, multi-faceted, parent-child love story. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines