Strange Relation by Rachel Hadas is a memoir in which Hadas shares how she managed to cope with the progression of her husband's dementia. It is an honest, achingly personal account of how she turned to literature and poetry, her most faithful companions, to help her endure her husband's deteriorating condition and the deepening silence. This is not a book full of facts on how to handle your spouse's diagnoses with dementia. It is the deeply personal account of how one woman tried to keep herself on track and tried to tell the truth about what she was feeling and experiencing.

Strange Relation is a memoir for those of you who love literature and poetry and know it can sustain you through personal trials. This is the book you would write if you carefully recording unexpected insights and deeper meanings in what you were reading while experiencing a major life crisis. Rachel Hadas also clearly shows the therapeutic benefits of your own writing and self expression. It is a book penned by a true writer - a true writer coping with a great loss.

I think many readers will note a poignant passage or gain new insight while reading, however, the really careful, poetic readers are those who can record how these new insights helped them live amid their stress, inner turmoil, and insidious silence. Rachel Hadas is one of gifted souls among us who stayed in touch with her feelings and managed to express them.

While I greatly appreciated Rachel Hadas' memoir, I must point out that those who don't necessarily enjoy poetry might not be quite as enamored of it as I am. The reflections really are very much literature/poetry based. But, on the other hand, if given a chance it could also be a great comfort to others going through similar circumstances.

Very Highly Recommended; http://shetreadssoftly.blogspot.com/ ( )

In this memoir, Hadas recounts how she used literature, particularly poetry, to help her cope with her husband's early-onset dementia. Though the changes in George were gradual, it seemed as though all of a sudden, Rachel was losing her companion of thirty years. While this type of situation would, of course, be difficult for anyone, it perhaps hits Hadas and her husband harder because they are a couple so dedicated to the work of the mind. She is a literature professor and poet, and he is a classical composer and scholar. Rachel struggles to find a meaningful way to relate to her husband, to save some vestige of the challenging and intellectual relationship they'd enjoyed for so many years.

A poet herself, Rachel reads poetry and finds her circumstances suddenly reflected in poems she'd read before:

"Though many of them are certainly beautiful, these works of literature didn't soothe or console or lull me with their beauty. On the contrary, they made me sit up and pay attention. Each in its own way, they helped me by telling me the truth, or rather a truth, about the almost overwhelming situation in which I found myself. I learned what isn't always obvious under such circumstances: I wasn't alone. Other people, these works reminded me, had experienced, if not precisely my dilemma, then their own, equally hard or harder. Those people had found the courage to face and describe situations which might easily have reduced them to silence. If silence was the enemy, literature was my best friend. No matter how lonely, frightened, confused, or angry I felt, some writer had captured the sensation" (pg. ix).

Hadas found companionship in such poems as Robert Frost's "Home Burial", Emily Dickinson's "Because I Could Not Stop for Death", Thomas Hardy's "The Subalterns", Philip Larkin's "Talking in Bed", and C.P. Cavafy's "Walls".

One of her most poignant companions is Penelope from Homer's Odyssey - she commiserates with Penelope and her "ambiguous loss":

"And now, neither wife nor widow, suspended in an open-ended period that was and was not waiting, enmeshed in the web of ambiguous loss, I understood Penelope again, newly, better" (pg. 61).

Like Penelope, Rachel both has and does not have a husband. Hadas because her husband is a shell of his former self, his mind failing, unable to connect with his wife and fulfill the role of husband and companion. Penelope because her husband, Odysseus, has been gone so long (twenty years) that most everyone, except his son and wife, assume he must be dead. Penelope must deal with a group of new suitors, vying for her hand; a hand that she knows in her heart is not available. In one of Rachel's own poems, called "The Flickering Reunion", she references this kinship. The last two lines are:

The waiting, and the pacing, and the weaving.

She's not a widow, but she sleeps alone. (pg. 62).

In all, Hadas shares about thirty of her own poems throughout Strange Relation, each one helping her in some way to process and deal with the emotions and circumstances of her life as a wife and caretaker.

Strange Relation by Rachel Hadas is part memoir, part poetry collection, and part literary criticism. I found it enlightening to read about how Hadas used literature to sustain her through difficult times in her life. The writing is excellent - clear, concise, poetic. Overall, an excellent read, particularly if you are a caretaker for a loved one, but even if you're not. ( )

A beautiful, profound, emotional, often painful story of a situation that is one many readers may face in the future. Rachel Hadas begins this heart-breaking story:

In early 2005, my husband, George Edwards, a composer and professor of music at Columbia University, was diagnosed with dementia. He was sixty-one years old. I was fifty-six. (pg. vii)

George's dementia manifested itself in a progressive, prolonged, irreversible slide into silence. He stopped talking, he stopped reading, he stopped playing music. Not abruptly, but gradually, so that it was only in retrospect that his family could pinpoint the onset of the disease. But the diagnosis proved to be only the beginning. Rachel had to learn to live in a marriage that became a shell. George was physically present, but she could often not determine whether George was mentally present. His unresponsiveness became an increasing source of angst.

As his condition deteriorated, Rachel returned to her teaching (she is Professor of English at Rutgers University) and found solace in her poetry, Greek mythology, the writings of Dickens, James, and Wharton among other, and the poems of Dickinson, Frost, Milton, among others.

This is not a quick read. It needs to be slowly assimilated both on an intellectual and an emotional basis, each reaction requiring different skills, processing and levels of grappling and grasping meanings. It contains many literary allusions, some less familiar than others. For readers without that strong literature grounding, the book may be hard going. However, the poetry is another thing entirely. It is simple, elegant, extravagant, gut-wrenching, and speaks to the reader without the need for any formal education in the genre. Obviously, those who read, write and critique poetry for a living will certainly have different experiences of her poems, but those of us who are more casual consumers still have lots to appreciate. By explaining how she wrote the poems, and what she was thinking as she wrote them, she allows us to accompany her on this troubled, dark, and often depressing journey of loneliness.

Whether Hadas' approach to coping is one that will prove helpful to readers facing similar situations ultimately will depend on the the reader's affinity for poetry and literature, and on their comfort level with solitude. It is a beautfully written presentation of one woman's journey of isolation and love, worth reading for the poetry even if the story is not one to which the reader can personally relate.
see full review at http://tutus2cents.blogspot.com/2011/04/review-strange-relation-by-rachel-hadas.... ( )