There is a scene in The Heart of Everything in which Elin decides to retrace her mother’s steps. She is the youngest of the three Jensen siblings, and initially the most reluctant participant in the search. Setting off from Booterstown Avenue at exactly the time it is believed Mags left the house on the day she vanished, Elin copies her journey as far as she can. She takes photos as she goes, carefully framing every shot and crouching a few inches lower to get the eye-line right. She seeks out what she felt her mother would naturally have been drawn to: the colourful, the amusing, the perfectly imperfectly human.
When her brother Raymond chides her later that morning for wasting time, Elin gets upset. She knows it was a hopeless exercise. She knew she couldn’t track Mags down just by taking a trip on the Dart. She finds it hard to explain that she was searching for her mother in the details of the journey itself. Trying to find her life in the playgrounds and puddles, the gable-end walls of empty houses and the attic skylights of railway cottages. In the sudden gloom of unexpected tunnels, and the uneasy flash of sunlight on the sea. She was trying to recreate and then record exactly what Mags would have seen.
By geography and circumstances, Elin has become far more alienated from Mags’ day-to-day life than either of her siblings. What she was trying to do by taking photographs, she explains to Raymond, was to capture their mother’s memories. Yet technology too changes the nature of memory: Raymond later recalls his girlfriend Jean choosing which of her holiday photos to keep and which to delete from her phone before they had even left for the airport to come home. Jean was curating their weekend on her phone, creating a joint version – a new, shared memory – of their trip.
If The Heart of Everything is about memory and what remembering means, then it’s also about its mossy flipside: forgetting. Mags is keeper of the family’s memories; she is the amber in which their past is trapped. So what will that mean for her children when she can no longer remember? Her disappearance rather than her dementia was my route into an exploration of what this forgetting means.
Anita, Raymond and Elin have all – in very different ways – been actively engaged in forgetting or “disremembering” parts of their lives. Though Mags has been facing the terrifying prospect of losing her memories, her disappearance is what forces her children to confront an event they each in different ways has tried to forget: the brutality of grief is created by memory. It’s impossible to untangle the relationship between memory and family identity, and the part childhood memories play in maintaining adult connections and dynamics. At one point Elin thinks, “She no longer has an adult life in common with her brother, no day-to-day currency to squander or save. But surely their past is lodged in a joint account. It has to be, doesn’t it? Because if it’s not, then it’s spent for ever, slipped like water through her careless fingers.”
BBC Scotland broadcaster Sally Magnusson wrote a memoir of her mother, the journalist Mamie Baird. Where Memories Go: Why Dementia Changes Everything is the story of a family watching a woman they love dearly slowly disappear down a terrifying path, and their desperation at not being able to prevent it from happening.
In the preface Magnusson writes that her mother “…loved words and taught her children to cherish them, too. Then little by little, she lost them. What follows are my words for my mother, words to recover a life forgotten.” This is what the Jensen siblings are forced to do, as they search for their mother – to use their own words, their individual memories, to try and recover her. As is turns out, none of them really knew her – or not in the way they thought they did.
Anita, Raymond and Elin each reflect during the search phase of the novel on what they will and won’t do when their mother is found. How is she to be looked after? Which of them will take charge of her care? They each battle with their own reactions and their own instinctive, panicked urge to disown responsibility for her. They each have to acknowledge how little they know about dementia, just as Mags herself does. They don’t even have the language for it. In their first encounter with Sergeant Corish, Anita finds herself struggling to describe her mother’s problems with “recall” as she persists in calling it: “The words Anita might use without thinking about someone else’s parent – doddery, batty, not-herself – don’t apply now that it’s her own mother. But she’s not sure what to say instead.”
Mags is struggling with how to approach her own situation, trying to find context and language for it. Her friend Liz tells Raymond, “I just remembered something Mags said to me last week…. We’d been talking about my dad’s early symptoms and I said something about him not being able to do many things at once, that he was best with short, defined sequences. So, no difference there, really, I told her, because he’d always been as bad at multi-tasking as most blokes. And she said: So a woman with dementia is a man?”
As Where Memories Go unfolds, it becomes more than a personal story, it also becomes a manifesto for social change in relation to ageing and how we treat older people. Mags sees how carelessly society treats people as they age, she hates the invisibility cloak that growing older has wrapped her in, hates the feeling that she is no longer any use to anyone. Her story shows the moral dilemma around our attitudes to ageing and dementia. Sally Magnusson quotes Henry Simmons, chief executive of Alzheimer Scotland as saying, “Human intervention is the chemotherapy for dementia.” Mags instinctively understands this. In real life, I wonder how many of us do?
The Heart of Everything by Henrietta McKervey is published by Hachette Books Ireland, £12.99. Hodges Figgis offers a 10 per cent discount on Irish Times Book Club titles. Throughout May, we will publish a series of articles by the author, fellow writers and readers exploring the novel, culminating in a podcast to be recorded at the Irish Writers Centre on Thursday, May 26th, at 7.30pm, and published here on May 31st.
