Michael Mark’s Visiting Her in Queens Is More Enlightening than a Month in a Monastery in Tibet, a 2022 Rattle Chapbook Prize winner, will resonate deep in the soul of anyone who has cared for, or watched the decline, of a loved one with dementia or Alzheimer’s Disease. It is a terrible loss, a loss of self, and Mark chronciles this loss of his mother Estelle with compassion, tenderness, and somehow even beauty and humor.
Caring for someone slipping away into the fogs of dementia can feel profoundly isolating, a world on fire where you, the caretaker, are the only one available to fight the flames. In “The Year We’re Living In” Mark describes his father sleeping during the day, “exhausted from the all- / night watch. She’s a wanderer.” How terribly lonely must it be, for Bob Mark, to keep that midnight watch as his wife tries to wander Queens?
There are moments, in Visiting Her in Queens, where I feel as if I could be reading about my own maternal grandparents. “Losing My Parents in a Small CVS Drug Store,” my God—we so often somehow misplaced mine, in a small Walgreen’s. I’ve no idea how they did it, small and shuffling as they by then were. But then, finally, “They move up from Deodorants and Toothpaste in slow motion. Each pushes / a cart for stability.” And no one is quite sure if they got what they needed. It’s been more than twenty years since my grandfather died and my grandmother slipped away into a world from which we could not shake her, but I can still remember them shuffling forward in that Walgreen’s in Madison.
It’s hard, for me, to fully review Visiting Her in Queens. I think I will need to read it at least three more times, twice more to get through the complicated morass of feelings it dredges up, as I think of my grandparents lost to time; of my paternal grandmother, who never lost her way anywhere, by God, and was still in her full mind when she left us; of my aunt, slipping every day deeper into a small world made brighter by memory care’s arts and crafts. But I know that even as I read it the first time, Visiting Her in Queens is More Enlightening than a Month in a Monastery in Tibet made me feel so much less alone. And for that, I am profoundly grateful.
Essentially a Nerd 