Stone Cold Tea

Book excerpt: In Stone Cold Tea, a beautifully rendered creative non-fiction memoir, Winn Bray Rathbun takes us from early childhood in small-town Welland, Ontario, where she was the youngest in a working-class family of six, to her growing awareness much later in life that her siblings’ perceptions and recollections of family life were surprisingly different from her own. As young children, Winn and her adored older sister, Jayne, enjoy a carefree existence within the shelter of their loving parents and older brothers, Jim and Paul. When their father dies while Winn and Jayne are still very young, their mother, Cathy, struggles to find financial and emotional equilibrium. As the fissures in Cathy’s fragile mental health deepen, she frequently withdraws to a place only she can go, leaving Rathbun to wonder, “What did we really know about our mother? Where did that thick river of Alzheimer’s take her?” With insight, compassion, and wit, Rathbun attempts to find some answers by weaving an imagined account of her mother’s memories, gleaned from both long conversations over countless pots of tea and Cathy’s own writings, into the narrative of her own life. This is a book that will resonate not only with those who have witnessed a loved one’s descent into Alzheimer’s, but with anyone who ponders their own family’s dynamics, secrets, questions, misunderstandings, and ties that bind.