“I wrote letters? To you?”: Letters as Memory Prompts in Dementia Care

Abstract

This paper explores a collection of letters that brought my mother and me together when physical distance separated us and, twenty years later, brought us some measure of togetherness in the face of dementia’s erosions. I worked as a volunteer teacher in post-war Uganda from 1986 to 1989, communicating with family and friends almost exclusively by handwritten letters. My mother promised to be my most faithful correspondent and she was. When my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2005, I knew that the more than two hundred letters we had exchanged in the 1980s would offer a version of her life before dementia’s processes began. This paper examines how reciprocity, relationality, interrupted presence, space-time, identity, gift, and voice resonated throughout 2007–8, when I used the letters as memory prompts during my weekly visits with my mother. The memory project extended the letters’ already complex temporality by juxtaposing two worlds: the cross-cultural world my mother and I were navigating in the late 1980s, and the unpredictable world of dementia care, where the letters sometimes elicited profound engagement, and sometimes—by their very epistolary nature—failed to bridge the unfamiliar distances opening up between my mother and me.