When It Gets Dark: An Enlightened Reflection on Life with Alzheimer's

By Thomas DeBaggio

Book Overview

Adeptly navigating between elegy and celebration, fear and determination, confusion and clarity, DeBaggio delivers an exquisitely moving and inspiring book that will resonate with all those who have grappled with their own or their loved ones' memory loss and with death.

With his first memoir, Losing My Mind, Thomas DeBaggio stunned readers by laying bare his faltering mind in a haunting and beautiful meditation on the centrality of memory to human life, and on his loss of it to early-onset Alzheimer's disease. In this second extraordinary narrative, he confronts the ultimate loss: that of life. And as only DeBaggio could, he treats death as something to honor, to marvel at, to learn from.

Charting the progression of his disease with breathtaking honesty, DeBaggio deftly describes the frustration, grief, and terror of grappling with his deteriorating intellectual faculties. Even more affecting, the prose itself masterfully represents the mental vicissitudes of his disease--DeBaggio's fragments of memory, observation, and rumination surface and subside in the reader's experience much as they might in his own mind. His frank, lilting voice and abundant sense of wonder bind these fragments into a fluid and poetic portrait of life and loss.

Over the course of the book, DeBaggio revisits many of the people, places, and events of his life, both in his memory and in fact. In a sense, he is saying goodbye, paying his respects to the world as it recedes from him--and it is a poignant irony that even as this happens, he is at the height of his remarkable descriptive powers. In his moments of clarity, his love for life's details only grows deeper and richer: the limestone creek where he has fished for years; his satisfying and lonely herb farming days; the goldfish pond his son designed and built in his backyard in honor of DeBaggio's passion for "any hole in the ground with some liquid in it"; the thirty years in his beloved home in Arlington, Virginia; his early career as a muckraker; the innumerable precious moments spent with his wife and son; his belated grief over his parents' deaths.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1416573208
• ISBN13: 9781416573203
• Release Date: August 2007
• Publisher: Free Press
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

When It Gets Dark

I read the book because I was helped by reading Mr. DeBaggio's first book "Losing My Mind". "When It Gets Dark" was just as inciteful. I have recommended both books to others and have given several copies as gifts. The books helped me see Alzheimers Disease from the perspective of my husband. I learned that it is very important for me to make the adjustments in our relationship and not get upset by every change in his behavior. I learned that humor helps both of us and that I can do some things I felt I would have trouble doing for him.

I REALLY LIKED THIS ONE

I really liked this one. It tells about the story of a 57 year of man who has Alzheimers,his love of gardening, his wife, son, love of cats,and his Italian family roots. It was a nice story about a man dealing with the disease and his family. I read this book in one night. Well written and a great choice of words. Parts of this book took me back to the old days when he talks of his family.

When it Gets Dark

Book illustrates that people with alzheimer's are human. Baggio , an Alzhiemer's victim) takes us on a journey of his life long affair with gardening. This sensitvely chronicles an ordinairy life as being something special. It lets us know that all of our lives are special and to be handled with care. This reader developed a bond with the author through his well chosen words. Worth reading if you are pre-disposed to alzheimer's though family history, have it or know someone who does. This is a delightfully sensitive and artistic book on a dreadful disease. It certainly helps with coping with it.