Finding Rosa: A Mother with Alzheimer’s, a Daughter in Search of the Past

3.6/5 ( ratings)

**Winner of the Alberta LIterary Awards Wilfred Eggleston Award for Non-Fiction**

When her mother, Rosa, begins to show signs of dementia, Caterina Edwards embarks on a myriad of journeys — geographical, intellectual, emotional — that turn out to be part of one journey, a search for the meaning of the past and of home. During the four years she cares for Rosa, Edwards must navigate between conflicting responsibilities to self, family, and work while dealing with her mother's confusion, hostility, paranoia, and fear, and her own physical and emotional exhaustion. As Rosa loses her memory and her self, Edwards travels to Istria, now part of Croatia, where she discovers a suppressed history of ethnic cleansing, loss, and displacement that altered Rosa’s life course irrevocably. This frank memoir limns a multifaceted history of two women in crisis, one struggling to maintain a sense of self against the demands of disease and the weight of a dark past, the other seeking understanding and solace in the face of something that resists both.