Award Winning Author Heather Menzies launches her latest book, Enter Mourning: a memoir on death, dementia and coming home. One of the Globe and Mail's "100 of the Best Books" of 2009 is now available from from Key Porter Books.

“The entire audience at the Alzheimer Society of Ottawa and Renfrew County’s seminar “STOP The Rising Tide of Dementia” listened intently to Heather Menzies as she spoke about the social impact of dementia. The power of her presentation was drawn from her own personal perspective as a daughter whose mother had Alzheimer’s disease. She was brave in sharing the feelings of denial, resentment, and guilt that she had as barriers to action before facing the reality of what was happening to her mother so she could really be there for her mother. Heather was inspirational in encouraging families and those who work in dementia care to take action now in order to slow down and stop the crippling effect of Alzheimer’s disease on families. Boomer-aged children, the bulk of the caregivers already providing care to aging parents with Alzheimer’s disease, looks to be the ones to provide even more of the care as the demand for publicly funded services far outstrips the supply.”
- Kathy Wright, Executive Director, Alzheimer Society of Ottawa and Renfrew County

Enter Mourning: a memoir on death, dementia and coming home is available for purchase at your favourite local independent book store or online at these retailers: McNally Robinson (click here to visit) Chapters Indigo (click here to visit) Amazon (click here to visit)
	“Mum opened her eyes and looked at me in the searching way I’d grown used to. By then I had come to believe that as words had lost their meaning, she relied more and more on body language, the steadiness of my gaze and the cadences of my voice, the basic alphabet of love. She heard at a level that I was unaware of, trust making up, perhaps, for cognition.”

Excerpt from the book's Introduction:

At some point, taking care of my aging mother stopped being an imposition, or even a series of tasks I managed with some semblance of grace, and became an experience that changed my life. It opened me not just to the unknown but to unknowing as a way of living, simultaneously letting go and letting in. I learned to give myself over to the crumbling and ebbing away of life and in doing this, discovered how it flows from the tangible, the articulate and the comprehensible to the intangible and the inscrutable. In the end, it’s almost entirely an act of faith, or so it seemed to be to me. …

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HEATHER MENZIES RECEIVES HONOURARY DOCTORATE FROM CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY IN MONTREAL

Click here to read the citation from Concordia University.

Click here to read Heather's speaking notes in accepting the degree.

MENZIES WINS BOOK AWARD FOR CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED NO TIME

Heather Menzies, a writer, academic and social activist, has won the non-fiction category in the annual OttawaBook Award with a look at how our lives are swamped by high-tech stress.

In an interview yesterday, Menzies said she was gratified with all the positive attention lavished on the book and noted that working on the project taught her lessons about slowing down.

"Yesterday I played hookey and went for a canoe ride"- from Ottawa Citizen article by Paul Gessell, 05/26/06

"A Globe and Mail top 100" book for 2005

Winner of the Ottawa Book Award (non-fiction) in 2006

Hear an inteview with Heather about NO TIME