Please welcome critically acclaimed author, Christoph Fischer as he discusses the inspiration and his personal experience behind his latest, beautifully crafted novel; TIME TO LET GO, a contemporary family drama set in Britain.
Book Description
Following a traumatic incident at work Stewardess Hanna Korhonen decides to take time off work and leaves her home in London to spend quality time with her elderly parents in rural England. There she finds that neither can she run away from her problems, nor does her family provide the easy getaway place that she has hoped for. Her mother suffers from Alzheimers’ disease and, while being confronted with the consequences of her issues at work, she and her entire family are forced to reassess their lives.
The book takes a close look at family dynamics and at human nature in a time of a crisis. Their challenges, individual and shared, take the Korhonens on a journey of self-discovery and redemption.
Excerpt
He heard Biddy stir on the sofa and his thoughts returned to the here and now. Biddy was all love and happiness when he went in to the living room to wake her with a cup of tea.
“Oh, you are so nice. Thank you, thank you so much. I love hot tea,” she said and she snuggled up to her husband. These moments of closeness had become rare between the couple and he cherished them. Sometimes he felt he had lost his wife for good with the disappearance of her memory, but then she was suddenly back for brief moments like this. They sat together on the sofa for a while without saying anything. Biddy took sips from her tea and Walter for a moment could live the dream that she was with him, as if she remembered exactly who he was and why he was here. Biddy leaned on him and he could choose to believe that it was a sign of their unbroken connection to each other. Dead brain cells, grey matter, synapses and shortage of chemicals – all the medical explanations did not matter.This moment did: him and his wife, Walter and Biddy Korhonen, and their unity on the sofa.
“You will make someone a good husband.” Biddy broke the silence all of a sudden, shattering the happy illusion, but she smiled at him with the utmost care and affection.
“Yes, I think one day I will!” he said smiling back, accepting that the brief, heavenly visit to the past was over and the new reality had returned.
“Now, let’s get you dressed and go outside for a walk. How about that my sweetheart?” he asked.
Selena’s Review
Christoph Fischer has once again masterfully crafted a story of courage, empathy, and love, showing us how strong the human spirit is when faced with life’s overwhelming obstacles.
TIME TO LET GO takes us on Walter and Biddy Korhonen’s journey, as they fall in love, get married and raise their children.
The prose, as is Mr. Christoph Fischer’s style, is lyrical and elegant. This beautiful and heartwarming story will captivate you from the first page to the end, tugging at your heartstrings, as you read how Walter takes care of Biddy, who is battling Alzheimer’s.
The author handled this heartbreaking disease’s symptoms, challenges and family’s struggles in a sensitive, realistic and intelligent manner.
The plot, dialogue and the deep-rooted emotions that run high for Walter, family and especially for Biddy are extremely well written and realistic. The author touches upon all the obstacles and sentiments that a family endures when faced with care-giving, and having to watch a loved one change from an exuberant and lively person to one that is totally dependent on others to get through the day.
Walter and Biddy’s daughter, Hanna, returns home to assist her parents, however, Hanna and her father are conflicted as they disagree on Biddy’s treatment and therapy. Walter is struggling to accept that his wife who is a part of his heart and soul is slipping away from him. We hurt for Walter and this family, as Mr. Fischer draws you in fully with his brilliant prose. I felt as if I were a part of this family, laughed, smiled and cried along with them.
A romance for Hanna is threaded in the story, making this a well-rounded book filled with a lot of heart and well-developed, flawed, and lovable characters that I came to understand and love.
I highly recommend this book for people of all ages.
Christoph Fischer’s Musings
“The Real Biddy Korhonen”
I grew up with only a few friends and with two older siblings who were miles ahead of me in their lives. My mother was a busy woman and so I spent a lot of time at my aunt’s house. She had always wanted to have four children but lost one child at birth. Her other three children were much older and didn’t need her much anymore, so my visits to her house filled a gap for her, in the same way as her attention to me filled a need in me. A match made in heaven.
Philomena, or Minna, as we called her, remained a source of happiness and encouragement throughout my life. I was always welcome and treated like a precious gift. She smoked, but she outlived both of her sisters (taken in their 40s by cancer).
In her late 70s Minna was diagnosed with Alzheimers’ disease. Well, I thought, at least she lives, belittling her misfortune without much awareness.
The next time I saw her, her trademark happiness however seemed far away. She was crying bitterly because she had lost her hearing aid, a very expensive one, too. Suddenly her life seemed to revolve around retrieving things. She was spared the physical pain of her sisters, but she suffered severe mental torture.
She fortunately reached a happier stage as medication and care helped reduce the misery in her life, but the attention she needed was a huge toll to the family. Despite her memory loss, she seemed to vaguely recognise me; me, the ‘child’ that lived abroad and who rarely came to visit. She had not lost her warmth and happiness, or maybe she had just regained it after the bad patch I mentioned earlier.
Very recently I saw her again, almost unrecognisable: withdrawn, very unresponsive and almost reduced to basic functioning. Surprisingly, she could still read and when I came to see her for a second time her eyes shone as if she did recognise me. I spoke an emotional goodbye to her and her hand was shaky and excited as she listened to my speech. She even responded by talking, using words that didn’t fit exactly but which expressed an emotion similar to what one would expect from a loving aunt in such a situation.
With her loving kindness in mind I created Biddy, the mother in “Time to let Go”, a selfless, giving woman, who even in her illness manages to show her innate kindness. I know it would be wrong to praise her for a gift that many other patients do not have, through no fault of their own. Losing one’s memory and control of one’s life is a terrible thing that you can only understand when it happens to you.
“Time to Let Go” is partly meant as a tribute to my brave aunt and to the wonderful people who help making her life dignified and as happy as is possible.
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Alzheimers
My book is inspired by personal experiences with sufferers from the disease. Nowadays, almost everyone knows someone who has relatives with Alzheimers’ and gradually stories and anecdotes about these patients have entered the social dinner party circuit and become common knowledge.
Alzheimers is a dreadful disease that cannot be easily understood in its gravity and the complex, frustrating and far reaching consequences for the victims and their families. There are different stages of the disease as it progresses and patients can move through them at different paces and in varying intensity. My book does not attempt to be a complete representation or a manual of how to deal with the disease. The illness affects every patient differently and there are many stories to tell and many aspects to cover. I hope that I can bring some of those issues to the surface and help to make the gravity of the disease more prominent. I did, however, decide to stay firmly in fiction and family drama territory, and not to write a dramatized documentary on the subject.
I have witnessed several different approaches to handling the disease by both individuals and entire families, and I have learned that the people involved in every case needs to work out what is best for them. In my book, a family work out their particular approach, which is right for them. They have different ideas about it and need to battle it out. These clashes fascinated me and I felt they were worth exploring.
Issues of caring at home, mobile care assistance or institutionalising patients are personal and, depending on where in the world you are, every family has very different options or limitations. The ending in my book must be seen in that context: as an individual ‘best’ solution that uniquely fits the Korhonen family.
As point of first reference and for a more comprehensive and scientific overview of information and help available I recommend: http://www.alzheimers.org.uk/ in the UK, and http://www.alz.org/ in the US.
There are support groups, helplines and many other sources available in most countries. These will be able to advise specifically for each individual situation.
I can also recommend “Because We Care” by Fran Lewis. This fantastic book has a comprehensive appendix with more or less everything you need to know about the disease: Its stages, personal advice on caring, information, tools and help available in the US.
For consistency, I exclusively used material relating to a medium advanced stage of the disease. To protect the privacy and dignity of the patients that inspired the story I have altered all of the events and used both first and second hand experiences and anecdotes. Nothing in this book has actually happened in that way. Apart from some outer parallels between my characters and patients I witnessed, any similarities with real people, alive or dead, are coincidental and unintended.
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Airlines
The airline plot is not based on any real incident but is inspired by my own imagination. I used to work for an airline and so naturally, much of Hanna’s life is based on my own experience of 15 years flying. I lived with the awareness that every time a call bell goes off on a plane this could be a matter of life and death. What happens to Hanna in the book has never happened to me or anyone close to me. My flying life was not that extraordinary. Fortunately.
But every year airline crew are retrained in emergency procedures and aviation medicine, and at least during those intense yearly re-training sessions your mind cannot help considering the possibilities of such events.
The modern trend of the ‘suing- and compensation-culture’ and the extent of it in some cases worries me a little, which is why some of that concern found its way into the book.
The lifestyle of cabin crew and pilots is often falsely glorified as a glamorous string of free holidays and leisure. A recent crew strike in the UK has brought the profession into disrepute in the media, as fat cats and lazy bones. My book aims to shed a bit of light on the realities of flying. I enjoyed the life and would not want to miss the experience but it is a tough life that demands huge personal sacrifices and flexibility, sleep deprivation on a massive scale and exposure to aggressive and abusive behaviour by a consumerist clientele. In the global trend of cost cutting, salaries are going down and what used to be a career is at risk of becoming a minimum wage job handed to people who have no experience and who have no incentive to give it their all.
My book is a tribute to my former colleagues in the airline industry, who, in my opinion, are unsung heroes and a bunch of wonderful, hard-working and very caring people.
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Memory
What makes Alzheimers’ so terrible? What is it that makes a memory so important to one’s life that people compare its horrors to pain-inflicting diseases like cancer? You are alive and physically well, you eat and function as a human, but as an Alzheimer patient you are bound to be suffering, frustrated, depressed and unhappy.
Of course it is ridiculous to compare the two diseases, but while a cancer patient has still their awareness and choices, the Alzheimer sufferer is losing the core of their being, everything they ever were.
How can you define yourself if you cannot remember? You have had children, but you won’t recognise them. You won awards, had a successful career, made people happy, but you don’t know any of it. Who are you and what are you doing on the planet? Who are the people around you? As the disease progresses, these things become more intense and you can live in a mental prison of fear and disorientation. Your brain won’t do as you want it to. The fear of losing ‘it’ altogether, for some is impossible to bear. You are about to lose everything that was ever precious to you.
That thought is frightening to all of us. It can happen to all of us. The worst stage seems to be when patients still notice that something is wrong. We all know how annoying it is when we just put something down and don’t remember where. Imagine that happening to you all the time, every day, and you get an idea of how it might feel. The carers see their loved ones slowly drift away into a stranger.
Biddy’s husband Walter in my novel becomes obsessed with preserving memories – his own and others. He begins to write a family chronicle as a constructive outlet for his fears. He is an important character with his musings about preserving knowledge, memories and facts and he allowed me to bring in thoughts about the disease on a different and more reflective level.
I hope that I have managed to write about more than just the clinical side of the disease. I stuck to the early stages of Alzheimers’ in the story because it gave me the best opportunities to work these thoughts into the story. It allows me to look back at Biddy’s past but with still a lot of hope.
About the Author
Christoph Fischer was born in Germany, near the Austrian border, as the son of a Sudeten-German father and a Bavarian mother. Not a full local in the eyes and ears of his peers he developed an ambiguous sense of belonging and home in Bavaria. He moved to Hamburg in pursuit of his studies and to lead a life of literary indulgence. After a few years he moved on to the UK where he is still resident today. ‘The Luck of The Weissensteiners’ was published in November 2012; ‘Sebastian’ in May 2013 and The Black Eagle Inn in October 2013. He has written several other novels which are in the later stages of editing and finalisation.
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