LitMed: Literature Arts Medicine Database

The Arrow Tree: Healing from Long COVID

Weliver, Phyllis

Last Updated: May-18-2021

Clark, Mark

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Memoir

Summary:

The title of this memoir derives from the Native American custom of bending a tree’s growth in order to indicate a direction of safe passage. The custom represents a reverent cooperation with nature through which a compassionate communication is accomplished: a message to other journeying souls as to how they might find a way to their flourishing. The title is exquisitely apt for this memoir, which echoes the gesture of the arrow tree, testifying to a safe passage through the wilderness of COVID. The author, a first-rate, published Victorian scholar, contracted COVID-19 in March 2020 upon her return from a sabbatical at the University of Cambridge, which was cut short as a result of the pandemic.

Weliver has suffered from symptoms ever since: hers is the experience of living with long COVID. The condition warrants her taking a leave from her university, and she returns to her childhood home of Interlochen, in northern Michigan. Her living in and engaging with the natural world there encourages her to undertake meditations about that world and her place in it as she lives with her illness. The writing—the foundational means of her healing—inclines her, crucially, to think with the stories of the Odawa (Ottawa) and the Ojibwe (Chippewa), Anishinaabek ("Original Man") of the region, which she researches as a means of deepening her understanding of her home, her origins, and the nature of her identity. Her quest for understanding turns not only to these stories, but to an integration of them with the wisdom of other guides in her life: authors of the Romantic and Victorian periods, poets and thinkers of Taoism and other ancient Eastern philosophies, mentors in her rich journey of studying both literature and music (she attended Interlochen Center for the Arts, Oberlin, where she double-degreed in English Literature and Voice (Music), Cambridge, and the University of Sussex), and her own family, particularly her mother. Her prose is accessible and welcoming, not at all the erudite sort one might anticipate from a reputable scholar: it invites curiosity and encourages insight that is, at times, breathtaking and joyous. This “arrow tree” memoir points its readers in the direction of a safe passage to the home of our natural world, where, in finding union with that world, we may experience healing not only from COVID but from habits of the heart that have left us more broken than we know.

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Letters from Limbo

Beaumont, Jeanne Marie

Last Updated: Jan-02-2018

Clark, Mark

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

This collection of poems is a memoir in verse: it is a lyric and epistolary exploration of what it is to live in the limbo of an emotional and psychological ambiguity whose genesis lies in maternal loss, mourning, depression, and despair. The poems are arranged in three sections: “Crossing,” “Asylum Song,” and “Holding.”

The “Crossing section generally conveys to readers the nature of life in this limbo, even as it discloses some of the familial anguish that has brought about a repressive silence in the poet’s mother, as well as a depression that wreaked its havoc on the poet’s growing up. The family mysteries and the suffering of the poet prompt her to research the death of her maternal grandmother, and we learn many details of that loss in the poems of the “Asylum Song” section.

A Czech immigrant, the woman had, in the old country, lost her parents and sister, and she’d apparently abandoned—for reasons unknown—her illegitimate child. She’d married an older man and moved to the States. After giving birth to another child, she suffered a postpartum depression, for which she was placed in an asylum, and was heavily and inappropriately medicated. She died within three weeks, at age 34. Her daughter, the poet’s mother, grew up in her absence and, in turn, lost her own child—the poet’s sister—in infancy, prior to Baptism.

According to widely held beliefs of Catholics at the time, the infant would thus be relegated to Limbo for eternity: she would be barred from union with God, this is to say, though kept free from any punishment or any suffering, other than the longing for a bliss she could never attain. Such a belief would clearly exacerbate the feelings of failure and guilt that a mother might feel in losing her infant. The poet’s mother’s depression resulted, unsurprisingly, in a bewildering absence of maternal care in the poet’s life: she is stuck in her own “asylum” or Limbo—a state of emotional confinement where she maintains some vision of “beatific” maternal love, but feels it forever beyond her reach to experience. The poems of the final section, “Holding,” convey the struggle and surprising joy of inhabiting this Limbo.

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The Fall

Singh, Tarsem

Last Updated: May-04-2017

Clark, Mark

Primary Category: Performing Arts / Film, TV, Video

Genre: Film

Summary:

This film focuses on the interaction between 5-year-old Alexandria and Roy, a Hollywood stuntman in the early days of film. The two are residents of a rehabilitation hospital, and both are recovering from falls they’ve taken: he’s paralyzed from the waist down as a result of a failed stunt; she’s broken her humerus as the result of a fall she’s taken in an orange orchard. (A child in a migrant family, she’s been tasked, at 5 years of age—presumably out of economic necessity—with climbing ladders to pick oranges.) Having accidentally intercepted an affectionate note—Alexandria’s child-missive—meant for the kindly but preoccupied nurse Evelyn, paralyzed Roy befriends the girl and quickly wins her over by telling her the wondrous tale of a masked bandit and his companions, all of whom have been betrayed by the evil emperor Odious, and all of whom are united in their quest for vengeance against the ruler. While Roy narrates the story, we see it take place through Alexandria’s eyes, and the characters she envisions are drawn from people in her life. The role of the heroic masked bandit she assigns to Roy himself, blended to a poignant degree with her deceased father. Alexandria sometimes interrupts and asks questions about or challenges the story’s development, whereupon Roy makes adjustments: it’s clear that the story is a co-constructed project. Roy has, however, become increasingly despondent over his paralyzed condition and over the fact that his fiancée has broken off the engagement as a result of Roy’s condition. As time goes on, Roy uses his unfolding story as a means of manipulating Alexandria to retrieve morphine from the hospital dispensary. He tries and fails to commit suicide with the pills that Alexandria supplies. In the process, he winds up bringing about a severe injury to the child. Filled with remorse and guilt, Roy alters his story such that it can be a source of separation between him and the girl: it becomes cruel and violent, and suggests that the hero is a weak, inglorious imposter who deserves to die. The anguished Alexandria protests, demanding that Roy change the story. Roy refuses, insisting that “It’s my story.” But Alexandria retorts, “It’s mine, too.” And Roy relents. The masked bandit of the story is redeemed, and Roy himself is as well. The film closes first with Roy, Alexandria, the hospital patients and staff watching the film in which Roy’s acting had led to his accident. As the scene approaches the point where the accident had occurred, Roy feels understandable anxiety; but the film has of course been edited. Roy is relieved, but turns to Alexandria, in the hopes that she is not terrified. He finds her beaming. Then the film we are watching, The Fall, shifts to a rapid series of black-and-white footage of stunts—the effect is reminiscent of the love scenes gathered at the end of Cinema Paradiso—narrated by the marveling Alexandria. Each clip features a person in imminent, catastrophic danger—who is then impossibly rescued at the last second by fortunate chance. As Alexandria blows us kisses through a character who is falling backward, we are left in a state of bewildered gratitude over this strange gift of stories we human beings offer each other—stories that assure us over and over again how, confronted with the calamities we see no way of escaping, we are nonetheless saved.

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Admission, Children's Unit

Deppe, Theodore

Last Updated: Apr-11-2017

Clark, Mark

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

The speaker of this poem is a nurse who is recalling and attempting to come to terms with a disturbing clinical encounter she’d had the week before. (I should note at the outset that there’s no indication in the poem as to whether the nurse is male or female. I choose to think of her as female). What had happened is that a mother had brought her five-year-old son in for treatment, and the nurse’s exam revealed that the child had second- and third-degree burns on his torso—in the shape of a cross. The mother, weeping, confessed that her boyfriend had, as a punishment, applied a cigarette to the child’s body—while the mother had held her son. Seeing the mother’s tears, the nurse considered offering the woman some Kleenex, but could not bring herself to do so. The child retrieved the box of Kleenex, then clung to his mother’s skirt, and glowered at the nurse. Then the nurse had participated with three others in prying the boy away from his mother. In the present of the poem, a week after the encounter, the nurse attempts to deal with the guilt and shame she feels in her failure of professional decorum and compassion—at having failed to rise above her moral judgment against the mother and offer the woman basic human kindness and respect. In confronting the chaos of her emotions, the nurse turns to a story she’d learned in high school: the story of St. Lawrence. The significance of her attempt to think with this story can be overshadowed, for readers, by the intensity of the clinical encounter she recalls; but her endeavor is of at least equal significance as the encounter.

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The Renewal of Generosity: Illness, Medicine, and How to Live

Frank, Arthur

Last Updated: Mar-28-2017

Clark, Mark

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Criticism

Summary:

The Renewal of Generosity: Illness, Medicine, and How to Live contemplates the phenomenon of generosity as it is realized in the stories of physicians and patients. For Arthur Frank, generosity is grounded in the willingness of people to give themselves over to dialogical processes of communication wherein participants best realize themselves through relational engagement: generous, dialogical communication leads to a renewal and realization of human being. Health care systems today tend to impede communicative generosity, however, and the result is a de-humanization and de-moralization of both physicians and patients. As a remedy, Frank proposes, first, that we re-figure our conceptualization of the physician-patient relationship—from the economic or business metaphor of “provider” and “client,” we should turn to the metaphorical conceptualization of “host” and “guest,” which clearly has implications for manner of treatment and communication that occurs in the relationship. In addition, Frank turns to and thinks with stories of physicians and stories of the ill to reflect on the ways that generosity is realized. Drawing on the wisdom of the striking philosophical triumvirate of Marcus Aurelius (Stoicism), Mikhail Bakhtin (Dialogism), and Emmanuel Levinas to amplify the reflections emerging from the physician and patient stories, Frank ultimately proposes “exercises” for training to generate a vivifying generosity within the medical profession, which can in turn lead to a re-humanization and re-moralization for physicians, improved care for patients, and enhanced flourishing for all.

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Wandering in Darkness: Narrative and the Problem of Suffering

Stump, Eleonore

Last Updated: Mar-10-2017

Clark, Mark

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Criticism

Summary:

Wandering in Darkness is an intricate philosophical defense for the problem of suffering as it is presented by medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas.The work addresses the philosophical / theological problem of evil, which might be expressed as follows: if one posits an all-good, all-powerful God as creator, yet suffering exists in the world, then (a) God must be evil, since he created it; (b) God is less than all-powerful, since suffering came to be in his creation, and he could not stop it; (c) God is evil and weak, since suffering came to be in his creation, and he did not want to stop it; or (d) suffering is an illusion. No alternative is, of course, very satisfying. In her book, Eleanore Stump augments Thomas Aquinas’s theodicy by reflecting upon what she calls “the desires of the heart,” a dimension of human experience that Aquinas leaves largely untreated in his consideration. Stump explores this dimension by breathtaking exegeses of Biblical narratives as narratives: the stories of Job, Samson, Abraham, and Mary of Bethany. “Understood in the contexts of [these] narratives,” Stump argues, “Aquinas’s theodicy explains in a consistent and cogent way why God would allow suffering" (22).

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