Mother in the Middle: A Biologist’s Story of Caring for Parent and Child
Touchstone/Simon & Schuster February, 2009
Sybil Lockhart was a neuroscientist pregnant with her second child when her mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. As her children began life, her mother descended into dementia, and Sybil entered the world of caregiving. All the while as a scientist, she was acutely conscious of the neurobiological back-story: the structures deep within her baby's brain that lit up with activity as the earliest memories were stored, while in her mother's brain neuronal fibers tangled and clotted and one memory after another was lost. Lockhart uses plain language to fuse her family's deeply personal experience with the underlying narrative of cellular neurobiology. From the unrestrained joy of children moving headlong into the world, to the tension of a marriage under pressure, to the bittersweet slow-fade that Alzheimer's disease forces upon a family, this is a story of connect and disconnect, between family members in a time of great change, and between the molecules that make up their very synapses. From the perspective of a biologist friend who explains what's happening on the inside, Lockhart reveals the intimate details of a common story with uncommon candor and with inexhaustible enthusiasm for the workings of the human body, mind and heart.
Artwork by Kimberly Glyder