Kaddish: For Mary Alice Kearney

By C.B. Dahl

My father found a stack of notebooks in his basement as he was cleaning up after my mother's death. He flipped through them and found a fragmented record of my mother's rapid descent into madness. The pages were filled with attempts at cogent narratives that tried to form a biography of a girl horrified by the realities around her; lists of medications and self-help regimens; letters begging for food and money; sequences that were missing chunks of time. He had found the Rosetta Stone that could decode her last days, a grim apercu into a mind quivering with fear, dulled by narcotics and wandering through broken fields of time. My father mailed them to me, simply saying, "Here, I don't know what you can do with them, but, here, they're yours." Since that moment the journals have repulsed me, intrigued and, at times, hypnotized me with their inquiries into the nature of time and existence itself. This book is the closest thing to order that my mother's story will ever take; it is also a peek into the mind of a dying mad-woman.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0DRV6FYKT
• ISBN13: 9798302770752
• Release Date: December 2024
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 144 Pages
• Weight: 0.44 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 9.0"