I'll Be Seeing You

May 1, 2020

Beloved novelist Berg, a New York Times best-selling author whose Open House was an Oprah's Book Club Selection, turns to nonfiction to tell an affecting story. Having observed her parents' ongoing love affair for decades, she finally had to step forth and help when her father developed Alzheimer's and he and her mother had to move into a special facility.

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July 6, 2020
Berg (The Confession Club) eloquently explores the pain of realizing one’s parents are in their declining years. After her father began to develop dementia in 2010 (later diagnosed as Alzheimer’s) and her mother was less able to shovel snow or use the stairs at the Minnesota house they’d lived in for 45 years, they moved into a senior community that her father enjoyed, but her mother barely tolerated. Their 68-year marriage became strained, and Berg’s brother and sister helped to defuse tensions by, among other things, accompanying their father to breakfast at the senior home, and getting their mother to join a book club at the facility. Two years after they moved into assisted living, however, Berg realized that the end of her father’s life was near. “Sometimes we feel pretty certain that we know what’s coming,” Berg muses. “But really, we never do. We just walk on. We have to.” Her father died the day after Christmas, just minutes after sharing with a caregiver a dream he had of fishing with his brother; Berg’s mother died three years later in hospice, with her parting words to her daughter, “I will miss you, too.” This bittersweet, touching story will particularly resonate with those caring for older parents.

August 15, 2020
Novelist Berg documents a year in the life of her aging parents. "Whatever your age, you are picnicking with your back to a forest full of bears," writes the author. At 70, she still feels youthful, "someone with grass stains on her knees and a roller-skate key around her neck," but she knows she will soon experience the physical diminishment her parents endured a decade earlier. This memoir charts a year in her parents' lives, from October 2010 to July 2011, when they were forced to leave their beloved Minnesota home and move into an assisted living facility due to her father's Alzheimer's. It was a dramatic decline for a man who was "a lifer in the U.S. Army whose way of awakening me in the morning when I was in high school was to stand at the threshold of my bedroom and say, 'Move out.' " Berg recounts her trips to Minnesota to help her parents adjust, her dealings with realtors and auctioneers unsympathetic to the family's tragedy, and conversations with her resentful mother, whose anger at her husband's rapidly slipping away led her to wish he would go to sleep one night and not wake up. "The failing of an aging parent is one of those old stories that feels abrasively new to the person experiencing it," she writes. The narrative is repetitive, with constant references to food and snippets of trivial conversations with acquaintances readers meet only once. This sketchiness and repetition suggest that Berg may have had mixed feelings about sharing this intimate portrait, and the memoir suffers as a result. Moving moments peek through, however, such as the author's portrayal of her parents' decadeslong practice of kissing first thing in the morning and last thing at night; when her father couldn't remember one day if he had kissed his wife good morning, he kissed her again to make sure. A tender if timid account of the sadness of old age.

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Starred review from September 1, 2020
As beloved, best-selling novelist Berg (The Confession Club, 2019) turns 70, her thoughts are often with her parents in Minnesota. Her father, who was once an imposing if not patient man, is heading into dementia; her mother loses her sister and is losing her patience with both her husband and her daughters. Berg's parents have reached the point where they are no longer safe in their own home, but resist the idea of moving into assisted living. Berg's sister, Vickie, lives nearby, but the author visits often to help her parents make this life-changing transition, and memories of her childhood come crashing back as she helps them sort through their possessions. Her parents always had a loving marriage, but as her father becomes more dependent on his wife, Berg's mother becomes so angry and resentful that the author and her sister finally lash out, and then suffer from guilt. There are bright moments, too, when her parents seem to be meeting friends and finding their place in their new home; but there are other challenges for both caregivers and patients when their physical and mental health continue to fail. Berg's fans will be touched by her disclosures, and readers caring for an aging parent will see themselves in Berg's painfully honest, beautifully written account, and be comforted by her insights.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)