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Reviewed by Asher Syed for Readers' Favorite
In his memoir Last August, Joe Gulla shares the month he believes will be his mother Mary Ann’s final one at Calvary Hospital in the Bronx. Alzheimer’s has brought Mary Ann to the hospice, where ordinary conversation has stopped, yet Joe keeps arriving with the music she knew at home. His daily greeting tells her who he is and why he has come. Each visit asks what love can still do when there is no cure. Joe learns to read Mary Ann through the way she holds his hand a little longer, then lets go when he must leave. In that exchange, Last August presents a son refusing to let disease make Mary Ann disappear before death arrives, drawing readers into his daily promise to stay there. The memoir is written in a poetic format, as if the words are prose in verse.
Joe Gulla’s Last August follows the daily hospice visits at Calvary Hospital, where a son deals with his mother's Alzheimer’s through a ritual centered on music and handholding. The memoir is extremely thoughtful, heartening when Mary Ann greets Joe with “I love you” on August 22, and jarring when, on August 25, a workday drive turns into his imagined final car ride with her outside the hospice. I like the way the author revises himself: he lets Mary Ann sleep on August 4, then later honors the aide who taught him to hold his mother’s hand after a theater dinner. Readers benefit from appropriate bedside language, since Joe announces himself before asking anything, and by seeing how ordinary ritual changes a room, such as flowers and the sunflower kit that give hospice visits a living task. This book suits adult readers drawn to end-of-life memoirs, especially those who appreciate literary family writing about hands-on devotion.
