Title: All Things Consoled 

Author: Elizabeth Hay

Type: Memoir

Pages: 272

Published: 2019

Hay’s relationship with her parents had always been a tricky one but when they move across Ontario into a retirement home just down the road from Hay and her husband, she finds herself struggling with their slow decline into decrepitude. All Things Consoled is a recounting of those years and the family history that came before.

It takes Hay years to understand her relationship with her parents, sadly after they die that is when she reflects how the relationship with a father who failed to see positive light in her life affected her, and also how dealing with a mother who had dementia impacted her adult life.

Gordon and Jean Hay married in 1943 when they were twenty-four. He was a history teacher, proud of his long career but never confident, strict both at home and at school. She became an artist, painting pictures natural world while determined to carve out some space for herself. When the family spends a year in London, the world opened up to Hay, paving the way to university.

When her mother begins to fall ill and has dementia, Hay decides to take care of both her parents, she takes them to an old age home where she visits them regularly for three years. Its only after they die that she reflects on the pain and frustrations her parents left her, their inability to praise her.

Some of Hay’s descriptions will be all too painfully familiar to those whose own parents have endured a long decline or seen others at close quarters – hard enough when the relationship has been a good one.

The book is as revealing about herself as it is about her parents, their scratchy yet close relationship and her attempts to understand them, particularly her father whose approval she’d craved and, eventually, realises she’d had all along.

The book reflects how we are all unreliable narrators of our own stories, but Hay’s memoir has a loud ring of truth about it. The book is really sad especially for those whose parents are incapable of showing love not because they don’t have it but because they don’t know how.