By Karen Brennan
Karen Brennan is a creative writing professor who writes both fiction and poetry. She crafted this beautifully written, easy-to-read, sometimes disturbing, sometimes humorous book as a way of grieving over her twenty-five-year-old daughter Rachel's brain injury. Rachel's impairments include a severe short-term memory deficit, "outrageous" disinhibition, and extreme mood swings. She’s euphoric one moment, filled with rage the next.
Being with Rachel is a candid, courageous depiction of the challenges one mother faces caring for her daughter. Karen and Rachel's story is one that will touch all caregivers and validate their feelings of anger, frustration, fatigue, listlessness, guilt, and loneliness.
This book is fair warning of the hardships in store for those caregivers who—by choice or necessity—carry 100 percent of the caregiving burden. In Karen’s case, her other offspring have lives and children of their own. Rachel's father, long separated from Karen, lives in another state. Friends fill in here and there, for a while, but then fade away. At times, the author simply runs out of gas; she allows lethargy to take over, and Rachel suffers. Sadly, this sounds so familiar to so many caregivers.
Garry considers Being with Rachel essential reading for those who care for a survivor with major emotional and behavioral impairments. Time after time, Karen's stories will have you smiling or crying in recognition of a shared responsibility. Karen bravely shares with the reader those sinister thoughts that most caregivers suppress.
Being with Rachel, however, disturbs Jessica. She feels that Karen was ill prepared to properly care for Rachel and too quickly abandoned efforts to find others to share the caregiving job. Both mother and daughter, Jessica thinks, were in desperate need of psychological counseling and medication. And Karen cavalierly dismisses the results of Rachel's neuropsychological testing, which we both believe to be an essential component of a successful recovery from a brain injury.
Our impressions of how Karen ultimately resolves her struggle to achieve an appropriate balance between her caregiving responsibilities and Rachel’s quest for independence demonstrate our differing opinions of the book. Whereas Jessica feels that Karen is abandoning Rachel, Garry views the final chapter as the beginning of a controlled experiment. We can only hope for a sequel.
Jessica does credit Karen with one wonderful idea. When Rachel was gradually working her way back from coma to consciousness in the hospital, Karen regularly cuddled in bed with her. What a grand gesture that surely comforted Rachel.