Summary:

The Changes is set in the deep South during the depression. A fifteen year old girl, whose main ambition is to finish school and go to college, witnesses her mother’s intentional starvation. The family attributes their mother’s irrational behavior to menopause, believing that all women going through "the change" become crazy.

The young daughter not only fears that her mother’s insanity is hereditary, but also that it may be partly her fault. The reader suspects that the mother may have intended to die in order that her daughter could afford to go school. The family seems to feel that the daughter’s presence in the household somehow drove her mother to insanity.

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Summary:

A psychiatrist who is skilled at hypnotism is asked by an oncologist to hypnotize a difficult patient prior to a bone marrow biopsy. The psychiatrist is able to achieve excellent pain relief through hypnotism, much to her own surprise. She is exhausted by the mental energy she has expended in this experience, and is discredited by the oncologist, who doesn't really believe that hypnotism is anything special.

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Summary:

A physician recounts the experience of caring for a small child with an incurable disease. The father brings in a bright stuffed dinosaur for the child and despite all expectations, the child opens one eye and reaches for the toy, then lapses back into a coma. The family and physicians cry together. A week later the child dies. The narrator uses this example to argue that it is the intensity of a physician's experiences and the privilege of being a part of them, rather than whether or not the experience is happy, that gives medicine its meaning and satisfaction.

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Summary:

A pediatric intern encounters her first dying child. Her initial response is to care for the child, hold him, and try to comfort him. She is told by her attending physician that this behavior is unprofessional. When she cries in response to her stress and grief, she is told she will never be an effective physician. The narrator then describes how she ultimately came to terms with her impulse to cry at stressful times, and how she interacts with patients in her current practice.

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Summary:

A mother reflects on her life in the country and on her son who has a seizure disorder. She is nervous about allowing him outside to play because it is hunting season, and because she is worried he may have another seizure and get hurt. She seeks to balance her need to protect her son from harm with his need to grow up as normally as possible.

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Summary:

The wife of a man dying of cancer takes him to Yosemite for one last visit before his death. During this trip she thinks about how her life has been changed, both by marriage and by her husband's illness. Yosemite represented a tradition for them where they vacationed with their children each year. As the narrator reflects on how her life will change after her husband's death, and on the needs she has suppressed over the years, Yosemite begins to represent a new kind of tradition for her which will give her nurturance in the future.

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Summary:

The author describes her experience of growing up with hearing loss. In this excerpt, she describes herself as a six year old orphan who is being raised by two aunts. Young Frances tries to hide her hearing loss from her aunts because she is afraid they will recognize that she is inferior or useless and get rid of her. She invents an invisible friend who chooses to hear what he wants to and who doesn't feel ashamed of this disability.

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Summary:

Mrs. Seaver writes about what it is like living in a nursing home. She writes cogently about the attitudes and behavior of staff, loneliness, lack of privacy, and her day to day experiences as a disabled 84 year old nursing home resident. The contrast between her former life and still-evident wit and intellect, and the way she is treated and diminished in her current environment is profound.

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Summary:

Fanny Gideon is having a tree house built just like the one she remembered from her childhood. The best times of her life were spent in that tree house and she hopes to recapture the clarity, joy, and freedom of her youth. The problem is that Fanny Gideon is 78 years old and has Alzheimer's disease.

She struggles on a daily basis with trying to fit into a life that she does not like, and with constraints that diminish her sense of herself. Her daughter is thinking about placing her in a nursing home. Mrs. Gideon almost burns down the house on a daily basis. The cleaning lady follows her around when her daughter is out of the house.

This story is about how an elderly woman and her now elderly childhood sweetheart attempt to recapture both their youth and their current lives against all odds. It is about preservation of the self despite memory loss, renewal of love in old age, and about rebellion.

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Summary:

A woman who works at a rehabilitation center for the blind reflects on the deaths of the people around her, clients as well as patients. She recounts the reaction of the staff to the death of a well-loved employee of the center whose name the narrator doesn't recognize. As she assists the blind clients at the funeral home, she suddenly realizes she did know the dead woman, but never had known her name. The narrator reflects on how a sight-impaired friend of hers, Vange, approaches life with supreme attentiveness, and never misses any details. The colleague's funeral reminds the narrator that living means being more like Vange.

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