Moments of Glad Grace is a moving and witty memoir of aging, familial love, and the hunt for roots and belonging. The story begins as a trip from Canada to Ireland in search of genealogical data and documents. Being 80 and in the early stages of Parkinson's Disease, Joe invites his daughter Alison to come along as his research assistant, which might have worked very well had she any interest - any at all - in genealogy.
Very quickly, the father-daughter pilgrimage becomes more comical than fruitful, more of a bittersweet adventure than a studious mission. And rather than rigorous genealogy, their explorations move into the realm of family and forgiveness, the primal search for identity and belonging, and questions about responsibility to our ancestors and the extent to which we are shaped by the people who came before us.
Though continually bursting with humor, Moments of Glad Grace ultimately becomes a song of appreciation for the precious and limited time we have with our parents, the small moments we share, and the gifts of transcendence we might find there.
Alison accompanies her father, in the early stages of Parkinson's Disease, on a trip to Dublin to indulge his love of genealogy. Through wit and humor, Alison learns to come to terms with her father's mortality and realizes that it's the unremarkable moments that are the most important ones.
Alison Wearing is the bestselling author of Confessions of a Fairy's Daughter, an Indigo Top 50 pick shortlisted for the Edna Staebler Prize and longlisted for the RBC Taylor Prize, and Honeymoon in Purdah: An Iranian Journey. She teaches, performs solo multimedia plays, and leads writing workshops internationally.
The customs officer has the face of a merry alcoholic who also enjoys his pie. His friendly eyes flutter when I tell him the purpose of my trip-to help my father with some gynecological research-but he doesn't ask any further questions. Just stamps my passport and says Welcome to Ireland, love, which feels like a moment of sanity in an otherwise crazed world.
I have come here to help my father with some genealogical research. He's quite serious about it and has been at it for years, but a few months ago he mentioned a desire to revisit Dublin's libraries and archives, adding that he would prefer to do it with the help of a research assistant. Count me in! I'd said immediately, though we both knew I fall asleep at the mere mention of genealogy, a word I am forever confusing with gynecology, particularly when saying it aloud.
Still, we're here. And a bit of boredom in the archives seems a small price to pay for the chance to spend ten days in Dublin with my dad. He'll be eighty in a few months-he'd say he's 79½-and is so fit and active I have wondered if I'll be the one scrambling to keep up. But he also has incipient Parkinson's, a disease that has begun to possess and hammer him, and I jumped at a chance for time together, now.
My father does not appear in the collage of tired faces watching a slow parade of suitcases file past. Having bought our tickets separately, we weren't sitting together on the plane, and I didn't see him in any of the lines at Customs. I park myself in a visible spot and pass the time by trying to conjure a border experience which includes the phrase Welcome to the United States of America, love, but no matter how many times I attempt to lift that small kite of words into being, I am unable to keep it aloft.
When most of the bags are claimed from the belt and there is still no sign of him, I notice that when a parent is about to turn eighty, a child's reflex changes from where the hell's he gone? to what if something's happened? I walk and peer and swivel and conclude that he must have headed out of the arrivals area without me.
