Summary:
Five years into writing about her mother’s slow decline from
a respiratory illness, Joanne Jacobson was diagnosed with a rare,
life-threatening blood disease. That discovery dissolved the illusion that she
and her mother had separate fates. “How could I continue writing about my
mother as though I were observing her from outside the circle of Illness?”
Jacobson asks (27). She can’t. And Every Last Breath becomes, as its
subtitle discloses, “A Memoir of Two Illnesses.” Doubling its concern, Jacobson’s
memoir in essays becomes a richer, more urgent, and ironic revision of her
original project.
With writerly attentiveness, perceptive intelligence, and
some impatience, the four opening essays witness the negotiations that Florence
Jacobson makes with her body, her environment, and her psyche. From a distanced
perspective, Jacobson wonders at her mother’s courage and stubborn animal will
to go on. Her mother’s slow pace and reluctance to let go—of her possessions,
her habits, her life—initially frustrate and puzzle Jacobson. She even expresses
impatience with the constant sound of her mother’s oxygen pump filling the
apartment, the inconvenient bulk of the oxygen canister, the tangles of tubing
connecting the machine with her mother’s nostrils.
As Jacobson’s diagnosis closes the distance she perceived
between herself and her mother, it ignites the memoir’s transformative insight.
It’s first articulated at the end of the essay titled “Mirror Writing” and it
sustains the rest of the memoir. Realizing that her mother might outlive her,
Jacobson writes: “. . . I can no longer pretend that the ragged approach of
death is likely to be smoothed by nature’s grace, or by the natural order. So
long as I believed I was writing about my mother, I was able to hold mortality
at a distance . . . Now in the mirror of my mother’s aging face I see myself”
(29). In “Dead Reckoning,” when Jacobson learns that her blood is starved for
oxygen, she hears her “own lungs fall into the thrumming motor’s pulse” of her
mother’s respirator. Revising her response to the technology, she writes that
it is “the sound of death being pushed mechanically away that is audible to me now—steadily
asserting its nearness . . .” (63-4). Jacobson’s descriptions of her
hospitalizations and treatments (“Written in Blood,” “If My Disease Were an
Animal”) take her on solo flights toward her new understanding of herself and
the “call to the imagination” that her experience issues (59). Jacobson’s
elegant and vulnerable rendering of her efforts to survive pain, uncertainty,
and terrifying treatments register her own courage and will to go on.
The final essays bring the shared destinies of daughter and
mother together. Jacobson thinks of them as “invisibly entwined, cellular,” as she
recalls that mothers’ bodies can absorb their fetuses’ cells (88). In “Book of
Names,” Jacobson’s closing essay, she and her mother read out the names in
Florence’s heavily edited address book, tracking the alterations in the
circumstances of those whose lives she’s shared. It invokes the lists in Genesis.
Begotten. Then gone.
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