Today you held your open hand out and I shook the pills into it, same as every day. Fish oil. Magnesium. Vitamins D and C and A. Gingko Biloba. “Hello, water,” you said, holding the glass against the moonlight and shaking the pills, like they were dice you were ready to roll, in your other hand. “Goodbye, vitamin.”Goodbye, Vitamin is about Alzheimer's and breakups, loss and heartbreak, but while it deals with some heavy, relatable emotions, the overall feeling is one of lightness and quirk; this is unlike other books about dementia or eldercare, examining difficult transitions without the usual tragic sentimentality. This book has a strange-feeling obsession with food and memory, and this seemed like the quirkiest focus considering the overall story arc, but then I read that author Rachel Khong began keeping a food log in 2008 after a messy breakup (thinking, apparently, that if she recorded the indisputable facts of her days she would always remember the events and sensations that went with those meals; that with this concrete recording of history she could never be emotionally sideswiped again) and that made perfect sense in retrospect: this is the book that only Khong could have written; a wholly unique perspective on the world, evident to the reader even when exactly what that perspective is isn't clear. This is a short read, but not a lightweight one despite its efforts not to drag you down.
It’s all so messed up. I think what it is, is that when I was young, my mother was her best version of herself. And here I am, now, a shitty grown-up, and messing it all up, and a disappointment. What imperfect carriers of love we are, and what imperfect givers. That the reasons we can care for one another can have nothing to do with the person cared for. That it has only to do with who we were around that person – what we felt about that person. Here’s the fear: she gave to us, and we took from her, until she disappeared.Ruth – thirty and recently dumped by her fiance for another woman – decides to go home for Christmas for the first time in years. When her mother asks Ruth to stay for a year to help her care for a father who is in the early stages of Alzheimer's, Ruth doesn't really have a reason to decline: after dropping out of college to follow the erstwhile boyfriend to the East Coast in support of his education, Ruth's own job isn't exactly her calling, and with few friends and not much else holding her in San Francisco, she makes the move back to her childhood home. Goodbye, Vitamin is told in diary form, and in its early entries, Ruth writes paragraphs every day explaining her history and everything that's happening in the present, but as the year and the pages go on, as Ruth's caretaking duties mount up, the entries become shorter, more infrequent, and more in the moment. This transition in form is subtle and it marks the interior transition that Ruth is making as well; from extended adolescence to full on adult.
Near the beginning, Ruth's father reveals that he had kept a notebook when she was young, recording all the interesting or adorable things she said:
Today you asked me where metal comes from. You asked me what flavor are germs. You were distressed because your pair of gloves had gone missing. When I asked you for a description, you said: They are sort of shaped like my hands.As a Mom, I couldn't not find that adorable, and as an adult watching an older relative succumb to Alzheimer's-related dementia, I couldn't fail to see the bittersweet in the change in Ruth's diary entries; from self-focussed angst to an effort to capture what was left of her Dad:
Today I saw you and Mom in the living room, reading, sitting very close. My foot fell asleep, you said to her. You took her hand and placed it on your foot and asked Mom, Can you feel it, tingling?I liked this very much: the subject matter was touching, the philosophy behind the inconstancy of memory over different perspectives was interesting, the actual events felt relatable, and I enjoyed the structure and the feel of the experience. It all worked for me.
