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One of the reasons I enjoy reading memoir is that the form lends itself to so many different approaches to writing about significant times in a person’s life. Sandra Tyler’s The Night Garden of My Mother is a case in point. I’ve never read a memoir quite like it before.

Night Garden opens in the immediate aftermath of her mother’s death at age ninety-six, when Tyler is unable to accept that the piece of herself who was her mother is irrevocably gone. She then traces the gut-wrenching process of her mother’s mental and physical decline over the course of three years, as.she must watch her mother slowly leave her, bit by bit by bit.

Making this decline even more difficult for Tyler to bear is seeing her mother trying to hold onto her independence and privacy when, for example, she has to give up her driver’s license and submit to a live-in caregiver. As time goes on, her personhood slips from her grasp. 

At the time her mother’s decline begins, Tyler is mother to a nursing infant and a toddler. Constantly on the road between her house and her mother’s, she is torn between her responsibility to her sons and her responsibility to her mother, and she doesn’t flinch from showing us that she didn’t always handle this conflict well. 

Tyler doesn’t let her readers–or herself–off easy. The memoir is unfailingly, painfully honest. Dying can be an ugly business as the body and the mind begin the slow process of shutting down. 

One of the great strengths of this memoir is that time is treated as recursive, rather than strictly chronological. The glimpses we get of Tyler’s mother through Tyler’s memories clearly show the woman her mother once was, a vivacious painter who often wore a brass sunburst pendant and bangle bracelets fashioned from soldered nails. Then there are moments of lucidity when Tyler’s mother surfaces through the dementia fog for a moment–when mother is back to being mother and daughter is back to being daughter–only for mother to sink back into the fog and the roles reverse again. 

Ultimately, Tyler fulfills a promise to her mother that she can die in her own home–despite the emotional pain it causes Tyler herself. Giving a parent the ability to meet death on her own terms is an ultimate act of love. I’m going to be thinking about The Night Garden of My Mother for a very long time to come. It moved me that much.

© Elizabeth Gauffreau

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Reviewer’s Biography

Elizabeth Gauffreau writes fiction and poetry with a strong connection to family and place. Her work has been widely published in literary magazines, as well as several themed anthologies. Her short story “Henrietta’s Saving Grace” was awarded the 2022 Ben Nyberg  prize for fiction by Choeofpleirn Press. She has published a novel, Telling Sonny, and a collection of photopoetry,Grief Songs: Poems of Love & Remembrance. She is currently working on a novel, The Weight of Snow and Regret, based on the closing of the last poor farm in Vermont in 1968.

Liz’s professional background is in nontraditional higher education, including academic advising, classroom and online teaching, curriculum development, and program administration. She received the Granite State College Distinguished Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2018. Find Liz online at https://lizgauffreau.com.