Laura Davis, The Burning Light of Two Stars: A Mother Daughter Story ( 2021) , Girl Friday Books, Seattle
When I ordered Laura Davis’s memoir, The Burning Light of Two Stars, from the local library, I was interested in it as a story of family reconciliation between mother and daughter.
My understanding was that Laura Davis and her mother had been estranged for decades on account of the mother’s refusal to believe that her daughter had been molested as a child by her maternal grandfather.
I had recently heard Davis interviewed and was curious about the process of reconciliation and what it might suggest about reconciliation amongst family and friends living with dementia.
Not enough attention is given to family dynamics when we talk about the challenges of living with someone with a chronic condition like dementia. It’s not just the disease that presents challenges; the relationship between these people has likely been going on for decades, shaped by who these people are and the ‘baggage’ they bring to their relationship from their different childhoods, and their different family, environmental and cultural experiences.
Imagine my surprise when I realised that Laura Davis had already been down that path! The mother with whom she reconciles is diagnosed with dementia!
Clearly, a big lesson for us all - as if we didn’t already know - our lives are larger, much larger, than our physical and mental health status. Who we are as people makes an enormous difference to how we respond to what happens to us throughout our life.
So, although this is clearly a book about dementia from a very different perspective to Wendy Mitchell’s book that I reviewed last week, dementia is treated by Davis very much as a peripheral issue.
From my reading of the memoir, Davis clearly had a number of issues to address and resolve, only one of which was her mother’s dementia diagnosis.
Certainly, how she responds to the stages of her mother’s evolving degenerating condition makes a fascinating story.
The other major lesson that I took from this book was the same lesson as emphasized by Wendy Mitchell: when you know one person with dementia, you know one person with dementia. People are people and each person has their own individual story and take on life.
The Burning Light of Two Stars presents something of a landmark that everyone can read, savour, remember and reflect on.
Buy your copy from your favourite bookstore, local or online, or borrow it, as I did, from your local library.
Write a review, talk about it with your friends.
It’s a book with at least two important messages: about dementia and about how the process of reconciliation played out in one family’s experience.
You’ll learn a lot about dementia and how it can manifest in a family.
But, perhaps more importantly, you’ll learn about the struggles and challenges inherent in family reconciliation and one woman’s honest and confronting account of how she faced and responded to the immense breach of trust between herself and her mother.
This book makes a good read.