Elaine Soloway's Green Nails and Other Acts of Rebellion Proves There is Life After Loss

Loss and life. They go together like a horse and carriage, love and marriage. Inevitably. Inexorably. If you’re alive, loss is going to happen. That’s the bad news. But thankfully, there’s good news: we have field guides to help us find our way. They are the memoirists who teach us by example how to move through the hard times with grace, grit and humor. For a challenge of this magnitude, you’ll want the best. I recommend turning to Elaine Soloway whose third book, Green Nails and Other Acts of Rebellion: Life After Loss, is a joy to read even when the events described are not joyous.

The book begins in 2009 as Elaine, 71, sat in her therapist’s office fantasizing about being single. Her attentive, thoughtful husband of eleven years was changing in ways that made him unrecognizable. Would he care if she left him? Doubtful. Once an ardent writer of love letters, he now appeared unconcerned with her existence. He stopped asking about her day. Their romance faded. He became short-tempered and angry. Watching television, he even raged at Oprah. “You’re fat!,” he shouted. “Perhaps he should see a neurologist,” the therapist suggested. And so it began.

Tommy was diagnosed with primary progressive aphasia (PPA), a form of dementia. PPA’s most prominent symptom is loss of language. Initially, patients may be unable to summon common words, although their functioning is otherwise intact. As the disease progresses, speech and cognition decline.

The diagnosis marked a seismic shift in the marriage. Elaine never again considered leaving. She refocused on Tommy, determined that this creative, athletic, good hearted, remarkable man, who it turned out still had a lot of love to give, have as normal a life as possible despite an illness that made his days – their days -- anything but normal.

A short detour: as a transplant to Chicago, I’m quick to recognize the Chicago spirit. It goes something like, “Yes, the weather is terrible. Now let’s make this winter as pleasant as possible.” To Chicagoans, crying and tears don’t accomplish much. For much of the year, tears freeze as they exit the eyelid and etch icy fjords in your cheeks. So don’t cry. Just do. Fight. The Chicago spirit is a celebration of human potential, a refusal to allow the dire to consume, a commitment to seeing beauty and humor in the most desolate terrain. And if you can embrace all that while being completely yourself and not worrying about what other people think, all the better.

It’s no wonder that Chicago has birthed so many extraordinary individuals. That Elaine Soloway is one of them, many people already know. The Chicago Tribune named her first memoir, The Division Street Princess, a “Best Book of the Year” in 2006. Before becoming an author, she was a press aide to Mayor Jane Byrne and communications director for Chicago Public Schools Superintendent Ruth Love. Bracketing those gigs were successful careers in public relations. Oh, and she is also a tech geek. In 2010, Apple hired her as a specialist at the Apple Store in Skokie. When she left Apple, she founded her own public relations firm which also offers college essay coaching and tech tutoring. She is mom to two daughters, Faith and Jill, both successful writers, whose names she had tattooed on her bicep on her sixtieth birthday.

The word “dynamo” may have been created before Elaine Soloway, but it was waiting for her to come along and define it. The moment she understood what was happening to Tommy, she dedicated herself to her new role as “rookie caregiver,” as she aptly terms it. Never denying the sadness of this unwelcome life stage, she never succumbed to it either.

As rookie caregiver yet manager of the team, Elaine had a daily challenge to provide appropriate support while preserving Tommy’s dignity. It was never an easy balance, but it is a lesson for all couples to see how she achieved it despite ups and downs, trials and errors, victories and catastrophes, all of which she writes about with unabashed honesty, zero self-pity and humor.

What happens when Tommy, an accomplished athlete, underestimates his decline and refuses to give up his solo visits to the gym and the driver’s license that gets him there? Or when he continues to bike through a park filled with kids and dogs? How about when, his speech nearly gone, he insists on taking the “El” by himself to a downtown medical appointment, adamant that his wife will not hover nearby? And becomes disoriented and lost? The resulting phone call is terrifying. How to ensure his safety and dignity without sacrificing one to the other?

The first half of Green Nails describes these challenges, Elaine’s many successes and some failures and a love that endures in a devastatingly altered landscape. Her resourcefulness, her ability to marshal friends and neighbors and her great sensitivity to Tommy’s feelings even when he can no longer communicate in conventional ways are confirmation of the superhuman strength of unwavering commitment. As Elaine says after one defeat, “Surrender isn’t an option.”

In a further heartbreak, Tommy dies from an unexpected, unrelated cause. Elaine chronicles the rebuilding of her life as a “rookie widow” in the book’s second half. These are very sad events, but this is not a sad book. It is a joy and privilege to accompany Elaine. Her honesty, energy, humor and refusal to be defeated are contagious and will lighten your heart for the realization that you absolutely can take the gods’ thunderbolts and hurl them back. Rebel! Life’s polar vortexes do not have to define or paralyze. They are big, but our spirit is bigger.

Reading Green Nails reminded me of something Roger Ebert, another extraordinary Chicagoan, said: “A movie is not what it is about. It is about how it is about it.” The same is true of memoirs. They are often about jarring life events, the kind that displace you from the life you knew. But memoirs are less about the events than they are about how the memoirist lives them, elevates them and ultimately imprints them with a unique voice and vision.

You could say that Green Nails and Other Acts of Rebellion is a book about illness, dementia, care giving and widowhood. And it is beautifully about all of those things. But it is about much more. It is about an energetic and pragmatic approach to life, extracting good times from bad times and about the ever present possibility of rebuilding. It is also about the importance of compassion and having your partner’s back. It is fitting that Elaine favors green nail polish. Green is the color of life and renewal.

Green Nails and Other Acts of Rebellion: Life After Loss will be published on September 16, 2014.

Meet Elaine in person at her book launch and reading on Wednesday, October 1, 2014 at 7 p.m. at Women and Children First Bookstore, 5233 N. Clark St., Chicago, (773) 769-9299

If you’re in Los Angeles, come meet Elaine at her reading on Wednesday, November 19, 2014 at 7:30 p.m. at Skylight Books, 1818 N. Vermont Ave., Los Angeles, CA. 90027, (323) 719-0465