Summary:

Margo Billis and her son, Matthew, barely endure a strained and rather twisted relationship. She is a 73 year old woman dying from cancer. Despite her illness, she continues to provide for her lazy, 40 year old son who still lives at home.

Matthew's condition might also be described as terminal in an emotional and psychological sense. He claims to suffer from endogenous depression and wastes most of his life sleeping for long periods of time in his garish green bedroom. His mother implores him to get a job but all he seems capable of is wallowing in self-pity.

Matthew has neither empathy nor sympathy for his mother's misery. One day he finds his mother dead in her bed. Her safe is open and contains $14,000, some undeposited but endorsed checks, a bottle of 200 morphine tablets along with a prescription for morphine, half a carton of cigarettes, and Hummel figurines. Matthew transports her corpse to the freezer in the garage where she will remain until he is ready to announce her death. Realizing he can co-sign her checks and forge her signature, he has finally found a job to his liking.

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In short chapters that alternate between remembered scenes of abuse, reflections upon those scenes, and tributes to the natural beauties and human kindnesses that tempered years of domestic violence, the author provides a galling, but not sensationalistic, record of what child abuse looks and feels like. Only when she was older and mostly beyond the reach of a father who routinely beat and sexually abused her and her siblings did the author find out that her father had been dismissed from a police force for gratuitous violence and had subsequently submitted to electroshock treatments for mental illness.

The title describes the nature of the narrative; in its deliberate discontinuities it testifies to the stated fact that there are places where memory has left a blank. Much of the telling is an attempt to piece together a story of recurrent violence, felt danger, and arbitrary rage that seemed at the time both regular and unpredictable.

The sanity of the narrative testifies to the possibility of healing. The writer makes no large claims for final or complete release from the effects of trauma, but does strongly testify to the possibility of a loving, happy, functional adult life as healing continues.

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The writer describes her experience as a cancer patient, thrust into "the Land of the Sick" by the diagnosis and treatment of lung cancer four years earlier. Although she is not ill, the fear of mortality embedded in a diagnosis of cancer is a dragon that haunts her existence.

To cope with the dragon she relies on talismen: her doctors, personal will, and her garden peas, an emblem of everyday life and its constant renewal. The talismen create the semblance of control over her situation. She observes that "doctors and patients are accomplices in staging a kind of drama" and that the patient and her continued well-being become talismen for the doctor too.

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Amidst the desolate pampas of Argentina, two nameless fugitives serendipitously meet and fall deeply in love. The woman, an orphan, is running from her tragic past and sheltered life. The man, a gaucho, is fleeing from the seven vengeful brothers of a man he killed during a fight.

Although both are emotionally wounded and isolated, they become joined by the simple act of cleaning and dressing the deep laceration of the gaucho’s arm. When they discover the ecstasy and contentment of love, their passion is abruptly and violently challenged by the gaucho’s injured arm which becomes infected with tetanus.

The woman faithfully cares for her suffering lover who silently endures the fever, severe muscle spasms, and wasting of tetanus before succumbing to the painful death of lockjaw. Ironically his face is paralyzed with a twisted smile due to the persistent muscle contractions.

The brothers of the man whom the gaucho had killed arrive too late to exact their revenge so they set fire to the couple’s farmhouse and burn it to the ground. The woman places a handful of her lover’s burning ashes in her mouth thus preserving his remains and uniting his spirit with hers forever.

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Summary:

This work touches upon a wide range of issues, more or less closely related to the trauma surrounding, the management of, and the aftermath of sustaining a serious burn. Divided into three sections, the work first defines burns not only on a biological basis, but as distinguished psychologically and historically from other forms of physical trauma.

In Part II the authors explore ancient myths and then images from modern culture that they contend define social perceptions about the meaning of being a burn victim. The final section poses problems that remain in the technique of burn management in its most holistic sense. An extensive bibliography/filmography completes the book.

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The poet expresses pity for all the poor, poor animals--for dogs, for mice, for earthworms, even for the "protozoons / that sway their cilia / so desperately." On the other hand, "patients / with progressive amyotrophic lateral sclerosis can just / fuck off." They should go live in the world of Hieronymus Bosch. [21 lines]

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In a pose reminiscent of both a Descent from the Cross, and a Pietá, a grieving woman reaches up to receive the body of a child. The drawing is a preparatory sketch for a series on death and bereavement--the "Farewell and Death" portfolio. The work is characterized by bold curving strokes that animate the scene, while conveying the heaviness of the dead child's body. As the body falls into the mother's arms, both mother and child seem to simultaneously float in some mysterious space.

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Two figures form a weighty pyramidal unit. Neither figure declares its age or gender, but the foreground figure--the dying-- seems female. She is held and enveloped by a shaded figure representing death. One of death's hands holds the limp arm of the dying while the other wipes her closed eyes.

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This is a collection of partly fictional, partly autobiographical stories about a young Russian doctor sent to practice at a rural hospital immediately after graduating from medical school. Muryovo hospital serves the peasantry in a remote region lacking decent roads and amenities like electricity. The doctor works day and night, aided by a feldsher and two midwives. Sometimes he sees over 100 patients a day in his clinic while attending to another 40 in the hospital.

The stories reveal in a clear, engaging style the doctor's anxiety as daily he encounters new problems (his first amputation, his first breech presentation, his first dental extraction) and-- for the most part--overcomes them. They also reveal a constant tension between the peasants' ignorance and the doctor's instructions. Full of blizzards and isolation, the stories are also warm and companionable, with vignettes of friendship, gratitude, and nobility.

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The 18 poems in this chapbook (26 pages) focus on caring relationships, especially between nurse and patient. In "Standing There" the poet admits that "our history isn't an album of healers." There is little to be triumphant about in the world of nursing and medicine: "Our story is how we did not break / and run--no matter how close / the lightning gouged." In "Blue Lace Socks" she evokes a nurse beside the bed of a dying child, "listening for the whisper of her blood pressure."

"Butterfly," a poem about caring for young men with AIDS, is characterized by honesty and sensitivity: "They cough as I enter their room, / and something in me stiffens." Yet, the nurse is able to close the gap between herself and the patients and demonstrate her care: "they are migrating back to the cocoon, / the place where brown masks / protect the unbeautiful." Some of the other poems deal just as sensitively with the explosive topics of childhood sexual abuse ("Taste of Tin") and rape ("This Red Oozing"). Blue Lace Socks", Butterfly, and This Red Oozing have been annotated in this database.

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