From the heart of the mountains in British Columbia comes this poignant memoir that delves into the nature of memory and the power of the human heart to heal. In her first full-length work of creative non-fiction, author Eileen Delehanty Pearkes investigates cultural ideas about care, compassion and loss in the face of her mother's terminal illness.

When Pearkes first realizes that her mother has Alzheimer's disease, she begins to consider what it means to be a mother, daughter and woman. Fuelled by a desire to heal herself, and care for her mother, Pearkes embarks on an inward journey toward understanding. During a winter spent in quiet reflection, she gathers historical, religious and mythic perspectives on beauty and womanhood which then nourish a contemplation of her own mother-daughter relationship. She discovers that beyond the fragility of her mother's body and mind, something intangible and enduring remains untouched.

Lyrical and intimate, Pearkes' voice resonates with the seasons as she takes us on a journey through winter to spring, from disintegration to wholeness. The evocative language of The Glass Seed reveals the influence of yoga, and an intensely personal approach to the politics of womanhood, from this emerging writer in the literary tradition of women's spiritual memoir.

Paperback | 184 Pages | 5 1/2” x 8 1/2”
ISBN 13: 978-1-932018-18-9
CAN: $19.95 | US: $17.95
Printed on 100% post consumer waste recycled paper
Now available

• In Canada, call 1-800-661-8711
• In USA, call 1-800-251-9273

EXCERPT FROM THE GLASS SEED

Chapter one: Memory and Her Muses

My mother is at the end of stage 6 of Alzheimer's disease (according to neurologist Barry Reisberg's schedule of decline). She has been suffering from the memory-loss illness for years now - perhaps as many as ten, or as few as seven. She can no longer dress herself independently, cook, count or tell time, though she still feeds herself if given time and has a lovely smile. Alzheimer's disease and the related dementias, from the moment they manifest, make the act of remembering day-to-day tasks less and less possible for their victims. In my mother's case, as with millions of others before and after her who have suffered this way, the disease has also robbed her of emotional memories with astonishing thoroughness, turning her own very personal search for lost time into a confused, fruitless pursuit. The disease always infects the power of the conscious mind to remember. It warps memory, weakens it, and finally destroys it.

I ask myself if the dream of the beautiful beaded bodice has prompted memories of my mother to rise in me because she is unable to resurrect many of her own memories anymore. If I have somehow begun to remember what she herself could not, or even, to recall something more universal about being a woman, about living a woman's life. The recollections, though they have begun to dance across my mind much the way anyone's memories might, do not always feel familiar. Do some of these recollections belong to her more than me? Or to her mother? Or to another woman further back in the feminine lineage of my family? Or even to a woman from another age or time altogether? Someone who loved to string necklaces of shell or stone, someone who went to a ball dressed in a beaded bodice the colour of a ripe persimmon, framed by a taffeta skirt as alive as early spring?

I ask myself if memory can be contained exclusively, discretely, in the mind of one person, or if it might it be a more collective experience than most of us perceive.

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