Summary:

Constructed as a triptych, the novel chronicles several generations of a Scottish family, the McLeod’s, across three Junes: Part I Collies, 1989; Part II Upright, 1995; and Part III, Boys 1999. In the first part, patriarch Paul McLeod assuages his grief and loneliness following his wife’s death by traveling to Greece on a tour. He tells the tour guide about his wife’s lung cancer: "A terrible ordinary death, you might say. Or an ordinary terrible death." (p. 23) Paul’s unrequited yearning for Fern, a young artist, heralds a succession of missed opportunities for expressions of love involving the McLeod’s.

The second part is a first person narrative by Fenno, Paul’s eldest son. Fenno, the gay owner of a Manhattan bookstore, cares for Malachy, a New York Times music critic, who has AIDS. Paul’s death brings the three sons together (Fenno and his younger twin brothers David, a veterinarian who lives in Scotland with his wife Lillian, and Dennis, a chef, who arrives from France with his wife and children).

The family relationships are complicated, and David’s infertility leads to revelations about strengths and weakness of various family members. Meanwhile, Mal’s illness and his decisions about controlling the end of his life, also give Fenno insight into loyalties and family secrets.

The last section, a coda, reverts to third person narration and reintroduces Fern, now widowed due to a freak accident and also pregnant. Themes of parenthood, responsibility and relationships continue to be developed.

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Piercy writes painfully and poignantly about the silent and slow death(s) from radiation exposure. In this nine stanza catalogue, she parades the incidents known or suspected to be the source of clusters of disease, disability and demise related to ignorant or irresponsible exposure of humans to nuclear testing and nuclear installations. She juxtaposes the beauties of nature, "The soft spring rain . . . " and the secret poisons with which man has contaminated her, ". . . blowing from the irradiated cloud." And, finally, she muses on the fact that we simply accept our symptoms instead of confronting our murderers.

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This is a series of vignettes involving a small cluster of patients in an early twentieth century tuberculosis sanatorium located in Scotland. The stories are narrated by one of the patients who makes observations and predictions about his peers in the institution. The lives Maugham chooses to have narrated are those of two men, long-term residents, whose daily entertainment is to irritate one another. There is a mixture of humor and pathos in the dialogue between these two. The second story within a story is that of the developing love between a dying man and a moderately ill woman--and the decision they ultimately make about the importance of their relationship in the face of the man’s impending death.

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Written by a Jungian psychoanalyst about her own experience with metastatic breast cancer, this memoir is a two year chronicle extending from the day of diagnosis through sequential remissions and relapse, to the remission following stem cell transplant. In the course of this voyage, the author deals with her own fear and anger, the range of responses elicited from family and friends, and her anxiety about the technology and impersonality of the health care system.

The book ends, but Middlebrook's story does not. She is feeling well as she recovers from her transplant. She knows she still has a lethal tumor. The only thing she doesn't know is when it will claim her life.

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This is the story of a child/young adult who had the misfortune of multiple health problems from the age of three until his death at 19. But even more than Jesse's story, this is the narrative of and by Jesse's father as he recalls the emotional rollercoaster accompanying the abbreviated span of his oldest son's life. The author kept detailed journals of his and his son's experiences with the health care professions, while also collecting the boy's artwork which appears to be Jesse's personal record of his own internal struggle.

Although not chronologically linear, the narrative allows the reader into the soul of the parents' agony, from the time of Jesse's initial diagnosis of hydrocephalus, through management of inflammatory bowel disease, and into the final chronicle of unsuccessful liver transplantations.

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The novel follows, in a roughly temporal manner with flashbacks, the evolution of the illness of a child afflicted with promyelocytic leukemia and her family's attempt to save her. At core is the issue of conceiving a child with the hope that she (Anna) will be able to provide what her older, ill sister (Kate) needs to survive. The initial need is met by cord blood transfusion, however, as time passes, Kate relapses, and technology makes new demands on the obligatory donor.

Eventually Anna, at age 13, requests emancipation from the health care control of her beleaguered parents. The reader is introduced to the dilemma as the adolescent donor seeks legal help. Over the course of the novel, which is structured with a revolving first person viewpoint, the reader becomes acquainted with the personal perspectives of many characters, but with no warning of the ultimate outcome of the family drama.

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This little volume of poetry and photos is a narrative of the life and death of a small boy with leukemia and the connection this creates with his mother, his father, and his stepfather. The poems are created by the child’s mother (the author) during the illness and after the death of her son in his early childhood; photos are done by the author’s brother. The author creates the scenario in her brief introduction to the collection of poems and photos.

In a stuttering fashion, the reader is guided through mother’s grief as she holds her son through multiple chemotherapy sessions, reevaluations, disappointments, and finally, the terminal events. The entire poetic experience is calmly reflective, but the deep grief of mother bubbles to the surface--in a controlled manner that makes the reader feel her pain, and also accept her acceptance.

The poems themselves are compelling in their simplicity: after Sam dies, the author writes, of a note of condolence received by a friend, "Now that I have a child of my own, / a friend writes, "I understand your loss." / "No," I think, "now you understand / what I had."

The author, as she adapts to the absence of her firstborn, has a second son. She reflects on the joy that she feels, but the impossibility of replacing a first love. The event of Sam’s death is so ethereal that it cannot be dated. It is a universal experience for those left behind. And Hutner leaves the reader with this sense of timelessness with her poetry, and with her own death from breast cancer in 2002.

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This is the wrenching history of the development, evolution, and eventual obsolescence of the leper colony established in 1866 on the isolated and only sometimes accessible peninsula on the Hawaiian island of Molokai--and the lives of the people who were exiled there to die over a period of more than 100 years. The tale opens with the declaration by the Board of Health that all persons proven (or strongly suggested) to be afflicted with leprosy be exiled immediately to the site on Molokai.

The author dramatically describes the selection and separation of the exiles from their families and the tortuous and sometimes deadly sea voyage to their primitive new homeland. Mixed with the public policy and the individuals who made and implemented it, are the descriptions of the hospital in Honolulu where diagnoses and dispositions were rendered, as well as the poignant personal stories of the "detainees." The reader follows the colony from the arrival of its first 13 patients in 1866, through its peak population of 1,144, to its residual 28 in 2003.

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This long poem is divided into 48 segments, each a meditation on the narrator's struggle to live with emphysema. Some sections consist of only one line (10: "How alone can you get?"), others are more lengthy; for example, section 37 is a primer on inhalers, "puffers, " how to use them and what happens if you don't.

Every observation in this poem is from a literate poet's point of view, one here focused on emphysema, and so the breath, the body, and the daily rituals of living become primary. The whole world breathes--even the computer, which "sighs" when it is turned off (section 34)--but the poet cannot catch his breath. Reading the poem, even silently, the reader becomes short of breath too, physically aware of the patient's limitations.

In section 24, Carruth laments that he cannot even negotiate the 500 yards up hill to his son's house; in section 29, he writes that even the dog seems "reproachful" when his owner is unable "to play" and throw the blue ball. The accumulated limitations of these taken-for-granted actions makes the author both "pissed and sorry" for the dog, for the man, for the world.

In spite of the physical rebellion of the lungs, the narrator continues to smoke, as many patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) do, adding another dimension to this poem. Even facing death, the patient's addiction to tobacco is overwhelming; in section 11, the narrator says, "Now I am dying. Now I am afraid. Please give me a cigarette." In section 45, Carruth laments this "nonsense of misery."

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This chapbook of 26 poems traces the author's interactions with her mother, a woman lost in the morass of Alzheimer's disease. In the first poem, "The Loss" (1), the author takes us into her mother's home--a disorganized mess of stained thrift shop clothes folded and refolded into piles. The daughter tricks her mother into moving in with her "for a trial" which becomes permanent.

In the last poem, "At Least This" (26), the poet stoops "to pull the diaper / up around my mother's / waist, my temple / near her breasts." As the daughter leans into this task, the mother caresses her hair, embraces her. This hug, beautifully and simply portrayed, is the poet's fragile reward for all the struggles, mercies and difficult moments examined in the poems between.

These poems are both beautiful and unfailingly honest, addressing with humor and charity the difficulties of caring for a parent with this disease. In one poem, "The Battle" (5), the mother slathers herself with Vaseline. In another poem, "The Bath" (7), the mother lies in the bathtub, her flaccid skin smoothed by water's illusion, her body suddenly as lovely as Bonnard's painting of a woman bathing. "This is the mother I battled / when young: the mother / who beat my defiance; / the one I hit back," the poet writes in "A Late Blessing" (6), and in another poem, "Intellectual Opiate" (10), she speaks of her mother's love for words she no longer understands.

But these poems are more than poignant narratives about a daughter's relationship with a once-difficult, now dependent mother. They address the "seeds of her disease" (11), exposing the flaws of this relationship without dishonor or blame. In these poems, Slatkin's mother appears vibrant and whole, not ravaged by disease. Rarely have the difficulties and possibilities of Alzheimer's disease been presented in poetry with such insight and respect.

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