The postcards:

“Alzheimer’s disease disorients not only the patient, but everyone in their orbit. It seems like an impossible task to convey, in writing, what this experience is like. And yet Alexis Orgera succeeds—she submerges the reader in a world of linguistic chaos, blending poetry and medical terminology, memoir and philosophy. I emerged from this book aching with grief for Orgera’s family’s pain, yet grateful for her stark, terrible and beautiful words.” —Sarah Leavitt, author of Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, My Mother and Me 

Head Case is a memoir in fragments, a lyric experiment in the immediacy of grief. Written during the end stages of my father’s Alzheimer’s Disease, Head Case chronicles the visceral and often painful experience of a daughter watching her father disappear. In 2010, I moved from Los Angeles to Florida with my then-husband to be near my parents as they navigated my dad’s early Alzheimer’s diagnosis at age 52. During this time, I spent days with dad—painting, listening to music, taking walks, reading poems, sitting on the porch and later in the courtyard of his memory facility—and recording these moments while examining my own memories through the lens of narrative, mythology and religion, visual art, migraines, ghosts, poetry, and science—all, I think, to understand what it means to be a human unraveling. In the end, Head Case is both a deep lament for a well-loved man and an exploration of what it means to live a good life.

“With unblinking honesty, Orgera’s kaleidoscopic narrative folds together family history, medical research, philosophy, theology, art and poetry, in her quest to understand the magnitude of such staggering loss. ‘What invisible rope connects father and daughter?’ Orgera asks. The answer—sustained across the most heartbreaking and unbridgeable gap—is the utmost in love and witness.” —Daniel Tobin, author of Blood Labors