“An Absent Mind” by Eric Rill – The Final Mile

Though at first most people have very concrete goals and ideas as to what they want to accomplish before their time on this Earth is up, as we get older most of us shift our focus towards just trying to be happy and keeping it all together.

Some have the misfortune of being left to scramble and make up for many lost years in their final stretch of life, as is Saul in Eric Rill's An Absent Mind.

The story focuses on a seventy-one year-old man by the name of Saul Reimer whose life forces are dwindling as Alzheimer's disease develops in his brain. Losing his sanity wouldn't be all that bad, if it wasn't for the fact that he has found himself estranged from his family. Along with the doctor taking care of Saul during his final days, those are basically the only people he gets the chance to know and get close to.

As the family reluctantly navigates the journey from life to death, from sanity to madness alongside Saul, they are called to set aside their differences and disconnected lives in favor of weathering the inevitable doom approaching on all of them together.

As you can most certainly tell, this is the kind of story that moves along at a rather slow pace and doesn't visit many different locales. Rather, the whole focus is placed on the Reimer family's dynamics and interpersonal relations.

Rill does a fantastic job at making a family's internal struggle a point of interest, depicting it in a realistic matter, relatable for many of us either because of something we lived through or the greatest fears we fantasize about.

He makes us feel the impact of the struggles this family has to go through, the burden that weighs down on them as they attempt to cope with one of life's most horrible moments.

Each and every one of the characters has a very distinct personality, with rather clear flaws and qualities. As is to be expected in this type of book though, the people do change and develop throughout the course of the story, and they do so in very reasonable and believable ways, especially when it comes to how they perceive each other.

More precisely, Saul's peculiar unrequited relationship with his son Joey is a fascinating thing in and of itself, really putting on display the complex nature of the human mind. Bit by bit, the estranged and disconnected family is brought back together into a whole.

Though it may sound like this is the kind of a story that becomes stale after a few dozen pages, rest assured that Rill knows how to tailor a story that sinks its hooks into you.

There are always more and more things to discover about the family members, new questions appearing, and even a few twists that feel like a bucket of cold water to the face.

All things considered, An Absent Mind is the kind of story that will have you thinking about your own life when you're done with it, and probably make you panic a little about your own mortality. It's a very touching and moving family drama that I can only recommend to fans of the genre.

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Favorite quote: "Brain is like a shortwave radio, mostly static that occasionally finds the station, but even then the sound isn’t always clear."

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Eric Rill Eric Rill is a Canadian author who, before venturing into the life of writing, held various corporate positions in the hospitality industry. He earned a Bachelor of Arts from Cornell University and an MBA from the UCLA. He wrote his first novel while vacationing in the Caribbean, titled Pinnacle of Deceit, earning him enough attention and encouragement to warrant two additional novels, and who knows how many more to come.