Poetry as balm in dealing with dementia

By Rachel Hadas

Paul Dry Books. 204 pp. $16.95

They are not always elderly. In 2005, poet Rachel Hadas' husband, George Edwards, a composer and professor of music at Columbia University, was diagnosed with dementia. He was 61.

Statistics, of course, are utterly impersonal, but it is people who fall victim to disease. Hadas' Strange Relation demonstrates painfully that dementia is a peculiarly interpersonal affliction. As George withdraws ever more deeply into silence, friends and colleagues draw away from him, leaving Hadas living with a domestic specter.

She copes by using the tools she is most adept with - those of literature. She encapsulates her experiences in poems of her own, but also discovers new meanings in poems with which she'd long been familiar - meanings she had never suspected and that proved strangely pertinent.

She suddenly found that the final stanza of Philip Larkin's "Talking in Bed," for instance, "captures a truth about trying to talk to a person with dementia that I have rarely seen acknowledged, let alone so crisply and authoritatively put":

It becomes still more difficult to find

Words at once true and kind

Or not untrue and not unkind.

As for her own poems, the one that may capture what she has gone through as crisply and authoritatively as Larkin's is "Hotel," originally titled "Dementia Blues," Hadas' "sole experiment in the blues form." Here are the first two stanzas:

Living with dementia is like riding on a carousel.

I said dementia is a big old carousel.

And you can't get off, but it turns into a hotel.

Year after year they reserve you the same space.

Year after year they save you the same old place.

They forget your name, but they never forget your face.

The way literary habits come to her aid is perhaps clearest in the chapter called "Similes." As Hadas explains: