the book
The face of Alzheimer’s disease is changing. A disease once thought reserved for people in their seventies and eighties, today is affecting a growing number of people in their forties and fifties. Nearly 650,000 people in the U.S. are living with young onset Alzheimer’s (Alzheimer’s under the age of 65). The Alzheimer’s Association is calling baby boomers a ticking time bomb.
My mom was one of the changing faces of the disease. She was in her early fifties when symptoms of Alzheimer’s began to appear. She was working as a counselor, wore smart suits, a short bob, and drank coffee by the gallon. She was planning for retirement, and begging me to hurry up and have a baby already, as she was desperate to be a grandmother. This was not the face of Alzheimer’s. Underneath the Ash is the story of how I became a mother for the first time while losing my mother. By the time I decided to take the plunge into parenthood, my mom was a few years into the disease. The story parallels my mom’s steep decline into dementia with the birth and development of my son. This was not supposed to happen in my early thirties. I wasn’t supposed to be losing my mom. She was supposed to be teaching me how to become one.
Set in the Pacific Northwest with an erupting Mount St. Helens, Underneath the Ash is much more than a story solely about Alzheimer’s disease. It’s the story of how the deterioration of one person can mirror the deterioration that misunderstanding and denial create in families. It’s ultimately a story of mother loss and the journey into motherhood.
