Dr. Marian Tally Simmons Brown is a retired educator and acknowledged scholar of Afro-American Culture, particularly Music of the Southern Fundamentalist Black Church. She has been a voice of recognizing the seminal power of the Black Church ritual in maintaining Black Culture in Conferences, Workshops, and Seminars throughout her professional career.For twenty years she was a Professor of Fine Arts, Florida State College, Jacksonville, Florida, participating in its Humanities Abroad Program, accompanying students to select Museums and Architectural sites throughout Europe and also its Group Abroad Program to Sierra Leone, West Africa, sponsored by the United States Department of Education.In 1992 Dr. Brown was among twenty-six Humanities College faculty selected from Colleges in the Southeastern United States to participate in a National Endowment for the Humanities seminar to study Texts of the Encounters of Pre-Columbian and Spanish Cultures at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland. It was while she was there that her mother's diagnosis of intermediate-stage Alzheimer's was confirmed. At the peak of her career with twenty years of tenure at her place of employment, extensive community and cultural arts activities along with professional commitments Dr. Brown made a conscious decision to return to her birth home and assume the responsibility of primary caregiver for her mother. This was a life-changing decision. An only child, without a committed extended family or an abundance of financial assets, she and her father commit to keeping her mother in the family home for the remainder of her natural life.During the last ten years of her mother's life, Dr. Brown logs the family's struggles as they watch over the mother and witness her transformation.Told through the voice of the family grandchild this memoir is not only for caregivers and families of Alzheimer's patients but for everyone who cares for someone. Dr. Brown continues to share her experiences in Workshops for Caregivers and those coping with Grief and Women's Empowerment Groups.
