"I'll Be Seeing You," by Elizabeth Berg

Elizabeth Berg always writes beautifully about women’s lives, families, love, relationships, and so much more in her novels. I have just read her memoir about her parents’s old age, illness, and death, and it is as beautifully written as her novels, and all the more poignant for being Berg’s own painful family story. The memoir is titled “I’ll Be Seeing You” (Random House, 2020). It is a short book (under 200 smallish pages) but packed with a combination of realism and emotion. Berg says she wondered if it was acceptable to tell her parents’ intimate story in this way, but concluded that what happened in their lives, and the lives of their children, was something that happens to so many people, and is perhaps not written about in this candid way often enough. Berg herself is 70, as she notes, and her parents were in their late 80s and early 90s when the events of their story happened. So Berg is not only thinking of her parents’ decline, but is also reminded that her own struggles with aging will come in the not too distant future as well. Her father is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and her mother – who was always dearly loved and taken care of by her strong and doting husband – is having a very difficult time adjusting. This comes out as a kind of simmering anger at her husband and at the situation, an attitude which bewilders him. Berg and her sister persuade her parents that they have to leave the house where they have lived for decades, and move into an independent living facility. The move is especially hard on Berg’s mother. Berg finds herself upset with her mother for not trying harder to adapt to the new situation. She and her sister have long gripe sessions about their mother. Yet of course they dearly love both parents; it is just that no one is happy with the developments, and no one quite knows what to do or how to feel. The memoir ends with both parents dying, first Berg’s father and then her mother. The parents and the daughters have by that time more or less adjusted to their evolving situation. But there is no glossing over the pain and difficulty of the situation for the whole family. Berg is very good at capturing the complexities and contradictions of everyone’s experiences and feelings. My family, like so many families, has had some experience with aging parents and of dilemmas related to aging, illness, and decline, and although the specifics of our stories are different, there are definitely common strands that resonate for me, and, I am sure, that resonate for many readers. There is no denying the often wrenching nature of the changes -- whether to a greater or lesser extent -- that old age brings, both for the aging people themselves and for their families. Berg's memoir provides no magical answers, but offers the validation and comfort of sharing common human experiences.