Remembering Home

2018 Readers' Favorite Gold Winner 2019 IAN Book of the Year Award 2017 Nautilus Award Gold Winner Feel like you don’t belong? You’re not alone.The world has never been more connected, yet people are lonelier than ever. Whether we feel unworthy, alienated, or anxious about our place in the world — the absence of belonging is the great silent wound of our times. Most people think of belonging as a mythical place, and they spend a lifetime searching for it in vain. But what if belonging isn’t a place at all? What if it’s a skill that has been lost or forgotten? With her signature depth and eloquence, Toko-pa maps a path to Belonging from the inside out. Drawing on myth, stories and dreams, she takes us into the origins of our estrangement, reframing exile as a necessary initiation into authenticity. Then she shares the competencies of belonging: a set of ancestral practices to heal our wounds and restore true belonging to our lives and to the world.

Research has shown that stimulating early memories can have positive effects for persons with dementia or related disorders and can energize the relationships between such persons and their families, friends, and caregivers. Remembering Home emphasizes the importance of home in the lives of memory-challenged adults, offers insight into the richness and variety of life experiences associated with the idea of home, and suggests ways in which caregivers can encourage reminiscences to improve the quality of life for those with dementia or associated diseases. This volume advances the goals of affirming the dignity of and reinforcing personhood in adults with debilitating memory loss. Environmental gerontologist Habib Chaudhury draws on research and fieldwork—along with the stories and actions of persons with dementia and their loved ones—to discuss dementia and the concept of self. He shows how recollections of home can reach persons with compromised mental capacity, and he shares techniques designed to spark conversation and stimulate participation in group and one-on-one activities. Chaudhury encourages health care professionals and activity leaders to embrace a personhood-affirming mode of care and provides tools and information for nonprofessionals who want to connect with, understand, and better appreciate people with dementia.

An old farmhouse overlooks the scenic Spoon River in western Illinois. It has stood there for over a hundred years, sheltering Bobby and Neoma Hanks and their children through the early years of the twentieth century until 1927, when they leave the farm. Their move to town has momentous consequences. By 1950 the family has split up and is scattered across the country from New York to California. Decades later, grandson Drew owns the farmhouse he has always loved and eagerly shares his cherished childhood memories with his younger cousin Sharon. But for Sharon, who grew up in a different place and time, memories of her own childhood home evoke very different emotions. After her mother's death, Sharon struggles to come to terms with her past and wonders whether life in the old house on the Spoon, where her mother was born, was really as idyllic as Drew remembers.

Memory, nostalgia and melancholy have attracted considerable scholarly attention in recent decades. Numerous critics of globalisation, transnationalism and cosmopolitanism have posited an overwhelming feeling of homelessness not only among people who have been displaced from their original home/lands, but also among those who feel estranged from their places of origin due to rapid social change or environmental decline. Arguably, homesickness is prevalent in today’s developed world, and can be – and sometimes indeed is – felt even for times and places unrelated to someone’s personal roots. Memory has been mobilised to justify recent conflicts, to question mainstream interpretations of past events, or to demand compensation for the suffering of earlier generations. Nostalgia has been employed as a “utopia in reverse”, revealing more about our unattainable “ideal present”, than about the elusive “lost” past it invokes. A corollary of nostalgia in the late modern politics of loss, melancholy has been a way of dis-identifying from both the horrors of recent history, and the growing insecurities of the present. The volume raises complex questions related to the ways people have coped with displacement and time-space compression, arguably the two most manifest symptoms of late modernity. How do we grapple with the traumatic experience of the loss of home? What strategies do we use, and what is their underlying politics? How do they intersect with identity positions, such as gender, class and sexuality? How might they contribute to the preservation of national cultures? How has our understanding of home changed in a time of mobility and flow? Spanning multiple Eurasian and Northern American cultural contexts, the book is of interest to an international academic readership within the fields of cultural studies, memory studies, gender studies, literature, art, performance, film and media studies.

"This volume advances the goals of affirming the dignity of and reinforcing personhood in adults with debilitating memory loss. Environmental gerontologist Habib Chaudhury draws on research and fieldwork--along with the stories and actions of persons with dementia and their loved ones--to discuss dementia and the concept of self."--Back cover.

How do you forget your first love? The girl that haunts your dreams. The one that no other woman could ever live up to. The one you left behind... It takes a tragedy to wake Aiden Thomas from his stupor, prompting him to return to his home town. Nothing could've prepared him for what he finds when he gets there. His life, as he knows it, is about to change. It was time to stop hiding behind his lens. Angel Murphy had her heart ripped away when she was a teenager. She survived the toughest times of her life, with the help of her family. Fifteen years later, after another cruel blow, she is again scrambling to adjust. Angel doesn't know how much more she can take, when the man she thought she’d never see again returns. Can she trust him to stay this time, especially when he discovers the secrets he left behind? *Recommended for readers 18+ due to mature content.*

Author Sonja Boon’s heritage is complicated. Although she has lived in Canada for more than thirty years, she was born in the UK to a Surinamese mother and a Dutch father. Boon’s family history spans five continents: Europe, Africa, Southeast Asia, South America, and North America. Despite her complex and multi-layered background, she has often omitted her full heritage, replying “I’m Dutch-Canadian” to anyone who asks about her identity. An invitation to join a family tree project inspired a journey to the heart of the histories that have shaped her identity. It was an opportunity to answer the two questions that have dogged her over the years: Where does she belong? And who does she belong to? Boon’s archival research—in Suriname, the Netherlands, the UK, and Canada—brings her opportunities to reflect on the possibilities and limitations of the archives themselves, the tangliness of oceanic migration, histories, the meaning of legacy, music, love, freedom, memory, ruin, and imagination. Ultimately, she reflected on the relevance of our past to understanding our present. Deeply informed by archival research and current scholarship, but written as a reflective and intimate memoir, What the Oceans Remember addresses current issues in migration, identity, belonging, and history through an interrogation of race, ethnicity, gender, archives and memory. More importantly, it addresses the relevance of our past to understanding our present. It shows the multiplicity of identities and origins that can shape the way we understand our histories and our own selves.

This in-depth description of life in a nursing/care home for 70 residents and 40 staff highlights the daily care of frail or ill residents between 80 and 100 years of age, including people suffering with dementia. How residents interact with care assistants is emphasised, as are the different behaviours of men and women observed during a year of daily conversations between the author, patients and staff, who share their stories of the pressures of the work. Living Before Dying shows a world where, in extreme old age, people have to learn how to cope with living communally.