Showing 1 - 10 of 657 annotations tagged with the keyword "Children"

First Death

Justice, Donald

Last Updated: Aug-20-2023
Annotated by:
Ratzan, Richard M.

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poem

Summary:

“First Death” is a 48-line poem divided into three equal sections of 8 rhyming couplets each, with a meter that is vaguely iambic tetrameter. Each section has as its title one of three consecutive days in June 1933 at the time of the young speaker’s grandmother’s death, presumably his first encounter with death. 

Most scholars reviewing his 2006 Collected Poems consider this to be an autobiographical poem, which well it might be since Justice would have been 8 at the time of this, his “first death”.   

Donald Justice has been described as "a poet's poet" and it is easy to discern why, after reading this poem, his colleagues held him in such high regard.  

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The Pull of the Stars

Donoghue, Emma

Last Updated: May-02-2023
Annotated by:
Duffin, Jacalyn

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

It is Dublin in late autumn 1918, the waning days of World War I, and nurse-midwife Julia Power is suddenly thrust into the task of managing a small ward of heavily pregnant women who have contracted the deadly influenza. Having survived influenza herself, she does not fear infection, but she worries about her lack of experience. She also worries about her shell-shocked brother with whom she shares a home. 

Two people appear to help: the intelligent but uneducated young volunteer Bridie Sweeney raised in an institution; and the legendary woman doctor Kathleen Lynn –who quietly reveals her competence and skill, even as authorities are lurking to arrest her.  

Over the course of just a few days, they encounter recalcitrant mothers, complicated deliveries, battered wives, stillbirths, and deaths. Influenza adds special dangers to the natural event, but some patients survive their ordeal. 

Although Bridie was to help for just one day, she learns quickly and returns. Julia is impressed by her diligence and drawn ever closer to her kindness and earthy wisdom. They pass a night together sharing confidences, and Julia begins to understand the physical and emotional mistreatment that Bridie suffered in the care of nuns. Their embrace awakens in Julia a yearning she had never imagined. But only hours later Bridie falls ill and succumbs rapidly to the deadly infection.

When an unwed mother suddenly dies after giving birth to a deformed child, Julia is horrified that the baby must be placed in an institution. Instead, she takes the baby home to an uncertain future but sparing the child the same horrors that Bridie once suffered. 

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The Last Strawberry

Swan, Rita

Last Updated: Mar-12-2023

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Memoir

Summary:

In her memoir, The Last Strawberry, Rita Swan describes the illness and death of her sixteen-month-old son, Matthew. As practicing Christian Scientists, Swan and her husband observe their son’s sudden symptoms and unusual behavior but do not visit a pediatrician. Instead, they hire Christian Science “practitioners” whose goal is to effect a cure through prayer. These prayers, however, fail, and Matthew’s condition quickly deteriorates. After days of unsuccessful faith-based treatment, Swan decides, in desperation, to bring her son to a hospital, where he is diagnosed with advanced spinal meningitis. Swan recalls, “We brought our Christian Science books to our comatose child in the intensive care unit. We read, whispered, prayed, and cried over him for hours every day, whether our Church believed it was right or not” (37). Matthew eventually died in the hospital in July 1977.

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Demon Copperhead

Kingsolver, Barbara

Last Updated: Jan-24-2023
Annotated by:
Teagarden, J. Russell

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

This novel recasts Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield for modern day as a literary take on the opioid addiction crisis in the U.S. during the 1990s and 2000s with apparent connections to Beth Macy’s nonfiction book, Dopesick, and the eight-part TV miniseries of the same name it spawned. The author, Barbara Kingsolver, assures potential readers that having read David Copperfield is not a prerequisite for comprehending and appreciating Demon Copperhead.   

Demon Copperfield, a name that evolved naturally enough in early childhood from his birth name, Damon Fields, was born into entrenched poverty in the heart of Appalachia, Lee County, Virginia. He tells his story starting from when he drops out of his drug-addicted mother’s womb onto the floor of a rented trailer, to when as a young adult, he makes a last-chance effort at breaking loose from the life-threatening clutches of Lee County. In between, his stepfather frequently beats him bloody, his mother dies from a drug overdose, he enters foster care, attends school off and on, and works assorted jobs, many of which involve illegal, unethical, and dangerous activities. All the while he is variously abused, starved, and exploited. 
 

Demon shares his plight with many others in the community, and though they help each other as best they can, nearly all of them become ensnared in the same traps—drug addiction, alcoholism, unemployment, hazardous occupations, unfinished education, familial disintegration, and societal abandonment. For Demon, these conditions and experiences obliterated any vision of a future free of entrapments, let alone one of prosperity and happiness. “Here, all we can ever be is everything we’ve been. I came from a junkie mom and foster care,” is how he assessed his prospects (p. 461). 
 

Amidst all this suffering and bleakness, an observant and caring teacher discovers Demon’s talent in graphic arts, and he gets a peek at a path to commercial success. He has to first fight off what he knows of “Lee County being a place where you keep on living the life you were assigned” (p. 460). His story turns to this fight and onto this path. 

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What She Left Behind

Wiseman, Ellen

Last Updated: Jan-03-2023
Annotated by:
Duffin, Jacalyn

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

Izzy is a teenager who has been in foster care for a decade since the age of 7 when her mother was imprisoned and judged insane for having killed her father. She struggles with a desire to cut herself. Her current foster parents, Harry and Peg, seem kindly and engage Izzy in their task to catalogue artifacts from the nearby state asylum that has recently closed. 

Izzy is given the journal of Clara, a patient who, at age 18 in 1929, was pregnant by her Italian lover, Bruno. She was committed to the asylum by her angry father.  Clara gave birth, but her baby girl was taken from her. She observed how the brutality of the hospital damaged those who did not belong there, eventually provoking the mental illness it purported to treat. With the help of a gravedigger, Bruno planned an escape, but their plan was uncovered, and Bruno died.

Izzy’s own story unfolds as she works her way through the journal, subjected to bullying and tormented by her anxieties. Peg kindly arranges to take Izzy to see her dying birth mother in prison, where she learns that the murder of her father was to prevent him from abusing young Izzy.  

Spoiler alert! Izzy learns from an elderly nurse that the asylum director took Clara’s baby for himself and that Clara is still alive. She reunites the mother and child, who is now a grown woman. Izzy joyfully learns that Peg and Harry will formally adopt her.

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Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Memoir

Summary:

In The Unseen Shore: Memories of a Christian Science Childhood, Thomas Simmons narrates the physical, emotional, and spiritual anguish of growing up in, and later leaving, the Christian Science Church. “Have I escaped now? Enormous question—who knows?” writes Simmons, “The obvious answer is Yes, of course I’ve escaped. I now go to doctors; I no longer lie for helpless hours in bed, writhing and trying to pray” (5). Christian Science teaches that illness and pain are illusions of an unreal material world, and that human suffering can be healed through prayer. As the founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, wrote in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, "Sin, disease, whatever seems real to material sense, is unreal in divine Science" (353). Simmons explains how this theological indoctrination distorted his view of the material world, morality, and the human body: “I remember very clearly several occasions when Sunday school teachers would warn us that medical doctors were not to be trusted because the world they believed in was not our world—it was the world of mortal mind, of disease and distress” (4). Simmons wavers uneasily between apostasy and piety, questioning if he should trust his physical, bodily senses (“mortal mind”) or the numinous promises of Divine care. As he grows up practicing Christian Science, suffering untreated ear infections and other illnesses, he struggles to maintain a posture of devotion while coping with spiritual misgivings.

These “tremors of doubt”, however, haunt Simmons beyond childhood into his adult years (106). Yet two powerful experiences draw him away from Christian Science: the study and composition of poetry and “the love of bodies” (67). In need of a different kind of spiritual direction, Simmons turns to poets whose works celebrate the beauty of the concrete world, realizing that “. . . I want the world, want its physical hardness and qualities of light and sound, the depths of its touch and soul. In the words of poets and teachers I see my own path back into that world” (129). Another key incident occurs following a bout of spiritual renewal when Simmons interviews to become a Christian Science practitioner (a kind of minister who prays for ailing Church members). Stopping to savor the beauty of the California coastline, he hopes the gorgeous expanse will reveal a divine sign affirming his spiritual ambition. He receives an altogether different omen, however, one he considers mockingly lewd, in the form of a naked man exercising on the beach below where he sits: “And yet I could not quite leave. For a few seconds I watched this man run. Far from admiring the precision of his muscles or the stillness of his torso as he moved his legs, I rejected them: they could hold no sway over me, for they were not real. But they remained interesting in their unreality” (156). (Readers might imagine this nude interloper as Vesalius’s anatomical man from De humani corporis fabrica [1555], who stretches and moves with certainty, exhibiting the magnificent brawn and sinews of the human form.) In this moment, Simmons's spiritual optimism almost vanishes, unnerved by the physically real, naked human materiality in which he will ultimately find solace and beauty.

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The Steel Windpipe

Bulgakov, Mikhail

Last Updated: Jun-02-2022
Annotated by:
Coulehan, Jack

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Short Story

Summary:

A little girl is brought to the rural hospital by her mother, who throws herself at the feet of the young doctor, “Please do something to save my daughter!” It seems that she has been suffering from a sore throat and is now having difficulty breathing. The doctor looks into her throat; diphtheria is evident.At first he scolds the mother for not having brought the girl earlier. Then he suggests surgery: a tracheotomy. The doctor knows this is the only way he might save the child, but he is consumed by anxiety because he has never performed the procedure. At first the mother objects to surgery, but then relents. The tracheotomy is successful and the child survives.

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Annotated by:
Dammeyer, Kristen

Primary Category: Performing Arts / Film, TV, Video

Genre: Film

Summary:

Life According to Sam provides insight into the life of Sampson “Sam” Berns and his family. At the beginning of the film, Sam states, “I want you to know me.” Accordingly, the film alternates between highlighting Sam’s experiences as he navigates life as a teenage boy and his participation in the first ever clinical trial for progeria.  At the start of the film, Sam is a 13-year-old boy in middle school. As with many other boys his age, his interests include Legos, music, and spending time with his friends, or his “bros” as he affectionately calls them.  

But Sam was diagnosed with progeria just prior to his second birthday. Progeria is a rare disease that affects approximately 250 children worldwide, caused by a genetic mutation which codes for the formation of an abnormal toxic protein, protegrin, that builds up in organs over time. It is a premature aging syndrome that causes progressive cardiovascular decline and for which there is no cure. The average age of death for these children is 13, and they die primarily of heart attacks and strokes.  

At the time of Sam’s birth his mother Leslie was a pediatric intern and his father, Scott, a pediatric emergency medicine physician. After his diagnosis, the family devoted themselves to progeria, an orphan disease which at the time had no identified genetic etiology, no foundation, no research, and no treatment. With the help of Leslie’s sister Audrey, the family started The Progeria Research Foundation, which raised over $1.25 million dollars, funded the discovery of the gene for progeria, and began the first clinical trials to test treatment for the disease. 

In the film, Leslie spearheads the first ever clinical trial for the treatment of progeria. The drug, lonafarnib, had demonstrated efficacy in mice and was FDA approved for a clinical trial including 28 children from 16 countries. The children would receive the medication for 2.5 years and return to Boston Children’s Hospital three times per year for a battery of tests. At the end of the trial, Leslie goes through the arduous process of writing up the results and submitting the trial for publication in hopes of making the drug more widely available for children with progeria. In the end, the trial results are published and the results for individual patients are released. While the medication falls short of being a cure, there are glimpses of hope in patients whose disease progression has been slowed or even reversed.

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Daughter

Davis, Cortney

Last Updated: Jan-17-2022
Annotated by:
Shafer, Audrey

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Collection (Poems)

Summary:

Davis, a nurse practitioner, chronicles her daughter’s life, illness and death at age 54 from cancer. The book consists of three sections, with poems unevenly divided such that of the 30 poems, only one rests in section II. Titled Windmill, this poem forms a fulcrum between the relationship of mother and daughter to one of mother and ill daughter. The windmill is a small gift from her daughter – a reminder of Kansas where the daughter, her husband and children live, thousands of miles from Davis. The collection begins with her ‘soon-to-be born daughter’ (page 15) and ends with The Sacrament of Time, dated months before her daughter’s death from, at this point, a widely metastatic breast cancer. The final poem holds within it an entire world – the birth of the daughter, the fraught frantic mother-to-be pleading for help, the birth of a healthy baby girl, the wonder of the new addition to their family, the travel with the newborn to home, and a reflection on what poems can and cannot do. “Poems cannot // save us, Amichai said, but all I have are these poems” (page 58).  

If the first section details the many ways unconditional love for a child unfolds, through wonders of babyhood, delights of childhood, the harsh lessons of adolescence, and the successful launch, the final section underscores how deep that love runs. As the cancer illness progressed during the pandemic, issues of separation became more acute. Davis marks the numbers affected (illness and death) by coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19) during the pandemic, as her poems follow her daughter’s cancer. These numbers, along with brief quotations from her daughter’s scans and reports, lend a contrast to the evocative imagery and experience of illness in a loved one. Medical mistakes are chronicled as well (see What a Terrible Mistake).  

The collection is dedicated to Davis’ daughter and her daughter’s children. Even the title, Daughter, calls to her, as if addressing her daughter directly. The title also serves to universalize the parenting of a daughter, even as the particulars of this family are detailed.

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Everything is Fine

Granata, Vince

Last Updated: Oct-03-2021
Annotated by:
Glass, Guy

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Memoir

Summary:

Vince Granata, the author of Everything is Fine, remembers feeling at the age of 4 that the day his triplet siblings were brought to their suburban Connecticut home from the hospital was the best day of his life.  For many years, to all appearances, his was the perfect family.   

Then, while in college, his brother Tim develops a psychotic disorder.  Refusing treatment, he becomes more and more delusional.  He speaks frequently about killing himself and is convinced his mother has raped him.  Announcing that “demons are everywhere” (p.115) he enters his parents’ bedroom and throws salt at them as they sleep. His mother, though trained as an emergency physician, dismisses the idea he could become violent: “Everything is fine” (p.122).  

When Vince receives a phone call that his brother has killed his mother, he rushes home from teaching abroad to find yellow tape surrounding the house.  The immediate, surrealistic concern is to have a company clean the traces of his mother from the rug.   

Over the next few years, Tim is treated to restore him to competency so he can stand trial.  Vince and his father visit Tim faithfully in a facility while two other siblings cannot bring themselves to face him.  A friend insightfully prophesies “I hope you will eventually be able to find some peace and feel whole again…though that might be your life’s work” (p. 149). Indeed, while his brother recuperates, Vince goes through his own healing process. He dedicates himself to understanding schizophrenia and the shortcomings in our mental health care system, and, finally, writes this book.  

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