Walking down a back alley one summer, I came upon an elderly lady standing behind a gated fence, on the verge of tears. “Please help me,” she said desperately, “I’ve got to get out.” Thinking she’d locked herself in, I moved toward the fence to help. But when I reached it, I noticed
a handwritten sign taped to the wood: “Please leave gate locked: my mother has Alzheimer’s.”

For several years now, Montreal writer Irena F. Karafilly (Ashes and Miracles: A Polish Journey) has been on the other side of such a fence, helplessly watching her own mother succumb to the terrible erasure of memory and identity that is Alzheimer’s disease. Karafilly’s new memoir, The Stranger in the Plumed Hat, follows her mother’s deterioration from stubborn and eccentric senior citizen to agitated geriatric patient, institutionalized with progressive dementia. To counter the destructive force of the disease, Karafilly assembles a portrait of her mother as she was: the Russian-born Yevgenia Ivanova, who marries a Polish Jew, travels with him to Poland and Israel, gives birth to two children, and immigrates with the family to Montreal.

The image that bookends the story – that of a lost photograph showing a younger Yevgenia looking forthright in a feathered hat – is one of the few sentimental details in an otherwise admirably direct story. Also, the author’s insistence that being a writer gives her a special empathy for her mother’s illness seems a little questionable. Surely there are sensitive plumbers and fast-food workers out there who feel just as deeply when a beloved parent is disappearing in front of them?

Despite the raw, traumatic nature of her experience, though, Karafilly is able to find the distance necessary to make this book more than a primal scream on paper. She is brave enough, too, not to whitewash her mother’s personality or the family past. In doing so, she renders a complex, believable human being, and allows us to share in her loss.