The sheep at the top of the stairs book review

Jan Seabaugh loves God eternally and non negotiably Its been a wild ride to get here and its not over yet I live in Ohio with my husband Jake the man God chose out of millions to share my life Im so glad He did Im a mom a cat mom a licensed professional counselor a graduate of Ashland Theological Seminary and a writer Im glad for all of it but mostly because the years of angst white knuckles bewilderment grief and rage finally brought me to the moment when God sat me down and said I AM That was the moment when Light entered my darkness and broke it all to bits Sweeping up the wreckage keeps turning up jewels that are now winding up in storytelling I love to tell the story because now its all about Him Jan Seabaugh loves God eternally and non negotiably It s been a wild ride to get here and it s not over yet I live in Ohio with my husband Jake the man God chose out of millions to share my life I m so glad He did I m a mom a cat mom a licensed professional counselor a graduate of Ashland Theological Seminary and a writer I m glad for all of it but mostly because the years of angst white knuckles bewilderment grief and rage finally brought me to the moment when God sat me down and said I AM That was the moment when Light entered my darkness and broke it all to bits Sweeping up the wreckage keeps turning up jewels that are now winding up in storytelling I love to tell the story because now it s all about Him site_link The Sheep at the Top of the Stairs might at first seem an odd title for a book length sequence that chronicles the poet s widowed mother s steady and irreversible descent into forgetting But this is also in equal measure an act of remembering remembering not the woman blunted by Alzheimer s but the strong willed and incandescent personality who was the beating heart of her family s life In poems that are plainspoken clear eyed and mercifully free of sentimentality and special pleading Jan Seabaugh reconstructs her mother s history in telling and intimate detail so that we might come to know her as she was But this is also a book as much about the present as it is the past When the poet becomes her mother s principal caregiver mother and daughter meet on new ground and join together in a relationship based on courage and tenderness In the end The Sheep at the Top of the Stairs testifies to the power of the imagination to salvage and repair to mourn and celebrate Difficult truths burn on every page The Sheep at the Top of the StairsWhen I was barely 10 years old my great grandfather died of complications from Alzheimer s I grew up hearing stories from my grandmother about how her father slowly and then suddenly forgot her her brother and his wife until all that was left was him crying for his parents to comfort him in a confusing world that no longer looked familiar to him I thought of him and of my grandmother through every line and stanza of this collection. Book the sheep at the top of the stairs pdf This was an equal parts lovely and heartbreaking tome of adoration for a woman and mother whom the author is desperate for us to know My favorite thing about this collection is that while it is very clearly a labor of divine unending love Seabaugh never loses her mother s humanness She is messy and real in ways we only ever get to see those closest to us. Book the sheep at the top of the stairs pdf Some pieces went on a bit too long and some grew repetitive and I found myself skimming whole pages Other pieces captivated me so completely that I read them two and three times through I received an advance review copy of this collection for free and opinions are my own 173275683X There is a very specific kind of loss that occurs when a person you love is physically there but due to brain damage is also gone The slow trickle of dementia becoming increasingly worse and slowly turning a loved one into a stranger with glimmers of the person you used to know It s often a long and bittersweet experience one that s captured precisely in this little book of poems Each piece invites the reader to remember and experience and sorrow and hope in a way that s not really like any other kind of losing Although it s not pleasant there s something deeply cathartic about getting to experience this along with someone else Thank you to BookSirens and Viveca Smith Publishing for this ARC All opinions are my own 173275683X