Memorial Memoirs: Absolutely Delicious & Apprenticed to My Mother

I’ve recently read these two memoirs which celebrate the fortitude of the authors’ mothers, especially in later life. Both stories are precipitated by a death: in the case of Alison Jean Lester’s memoir, it’s her mother’s confrontation with terminal cancer; for Geoff Le Pard, it’s the revelation of a new side of his mother’s character on becoming a widow. Both are touching tributes, peppered with poetry and humour.

Absolutely Delicious: a Chronicle of Extraordinary Dying by Alison Jean Lester

We all die, but even in this extraordinary year we don’t talk much about our own mortality. So a book that chronicles a death as the conclusion of a life well-lived is as sharp and satisfying as a gin and tonic with lime.
 
Valerie Lester perceived her move into a hospice some months after being diagnosed with terminal cancer as “a retirement from things as well as from activity”. In this memoir, peppered with poetry, and illustrations by Mary Ann Frye, Alison Jean Lester honours her mother’s decision to forego life-prolonging treatment in order to enjoy the life she had left.
 
It’s a story of love and acceptance and knowing oneself well enough to choose the manner of letting go. Her gradual detachment seems a reversal of the attachments we learn in infancy and the unsettled period, notable even in someone reconciled to death, parallels the awkward journey through the birth canal. Uncomfortable as that may be, there’s an uplifting message in the circularity: like plants and like other animals, we die so others can be born.
 
Not a fan of memoir, I wouldn’t have read this if I hadn’t enjoyed the author’s novels, the most recent being Yuki Means Happiness, but I’m glad I did.

Apprenticed to My Mother by Geoff Le Pard

As the lone woman in a household of males, Barbara Le Pard seemed a shadowy figure to the younger of her two sons. When his father died, Geoff assumed he’d have to step up his support for his mother. A successful lawyer about to turn fifty, with two children himself, Geoff was about to learn a surprising lesson: it wasn’t his father who’d been the driving force of the family, but his mother. And now there was a vacancy, if not for a husband then for another Le Pard to manage. By default, Geoff got the job.
 
With touching details, and his trademark self-deprecatory humour, this is a moving memoir of the power behind the throne. A tribute to a dying breed (no pun intended) of twentieth century women who, neither submitting to nor rebelling against their second-class status, subverted it in the service of the family they loved. And were loved in return.
 
I felt I knew Barbara a little already from Geoff’s blog, and especially from this thread about his parents’ war-time romance, but was charmed to meet her again. And her dismay at discovering her facial wrinkles after the removal of her cataracts really made me laugh. I think the narrative could have been made a little tighter – although it’s not overly long – but overall it’s an entertaining and uplifting read.
 
I received a copy of this book from the author for my entry in the 2018 Flash Fiction Rodeo.