Summary:

The basis for this autobiographical essay on the experience of having a malignancy are 92 illustrations, all the work of the author; they include 32 ink or woodcut sketches, 24 charcoal drawings, and many acrylic paintings (16 in full colour). Pope's images evoke the dependence, fear, loneliness, pain, and even the mutilation surrounding cancer illness and therapy.

He describes in plain language the course of his own illness, diagnosis, and treatment; he also relates the experiences of a few fellow patients. Most intriguing is his ready description of the stories behind his pictures: who posed, how he painted them, and what exactly he was trying to convey. When the book was published, Pope was in a hard-won remission from Hodgkin's Disease, but he died the following year of treatment-induced bone marrow failure.

View full annotation

Summary:

Born with aortic stenosis in 1984, Adam Ferrara Jasheway died suddenly at age nineteen of cardiac arrest. Dedicated to the memory of her son, this collection poignantly charts a mother's trajectory of grief. The poems are divided/organized into six sections paralleling the process of alchemy: calcinatio (burning by fire), solutio (dissolving in water), sublimatio (rising in air), coagulatio (falling to earth), mortificatio (decaying), and transmutatio (healing).

View full annotation

Summary:

Two hospice nurses describe their work with dying patients, especially with the special forms of communication typical of dying patients. The authors define "Nearing Death Awareness" as patients' knowledge and expression about their own dying. What doctors and family members may assume is the patient "losing it" or "hallucinating" actually is often a kind of symbolic communication dying patients typically use, either to describe their dying experiences or to request something they need for a peaceful death (such as seeing a loved one). By dismissing the patient as "confused," caregivers miss the opportunity to help the patient and may also alienate and frustrate both patient and family. By being aware of what is going on, caregivers can be more responsive and comforting to the patient and the family.

View full annotation

Summary:

Ann, the primary protagonist, is diagnosed with and operated on for breast cancer. Her family history leads her to suspect that she may have passed the breast cancer gene on to her daughters-this assertion without having been tested. She retreats from society. Her husband leaves her and she raises two daughters, ever plagued with guilt. The two daughters, as technology advances, choose to have themselves tested. One daughter, tests positive for BRCA-2; the second daughter is not tested, but is diagnosed with breast cancer.

The mystery becomes: from which parent did the women inherit the gene? While the younger daughter struggles with her progressive cancer, the older daughter goes in search of the genetic contributor. Since this becomes a search for an answer, the answer remains up to the reader to pursue. The angst created by the unanswered questions makes up the bulk of the intrigue, and may emulate real life struggles with this particular disease.

View full annotation

Summary:

This is the tale of two youngsters who are, each in his or her own way, misfits in their environment. Jess is the only son of a farm family in the south, who cannot find his place as a fifth grader in his school. Leslie is the new arrival on the scene, who is also, for very different reasons, not a part of the local culture. The two connect, create their own magical kingdom in which they can reign and feel comfortable. They swing across the creek on a rope into Teribithia, a forested respite from a world that does not seem to work comfortably for either of them. The tale evolves through the development of this friendship, only to end in tragedy when Leslie drowns in the creek one day when Jess is away. The remainder of the story has to do with Jess's grief work, his steps through most of Kubler-Ross' stages, and eventual reconciliation with the loss of his best friend.

View full annotation

Summary:

John Grogan's best selling memoir of his and his family's life with an exuberant, loving Labrador retriever pup that grew into an overly boisterous ninety-seven pound member of the family chronicles the joys and tribulations of dog ownership. Particularly, of Marley ownership. Marley flunked obedience school, required tranquilizers to tolerate thunder storms, destroyed possessions and jumped on people, to name a few traits.

The young married couple adopted Marley before they had children. The reader learns of the pregnancies and births of the Grogan's three children, including a miscarriage, ‘performance failure' during sex timed to ovulation, and an episode of post-partum depression, with an eye to what Marley was up to during that phase of family life, and especially how he responded to his owners' emotional states. Marley's protective stance towards not only the children, but also to a knifing victim in the neighborhood and to Grogan himself when he was struck by lightning, proved the dog's loyalty and devotion.

Marley lived a full life; as he aged, his hearing, sight and mobility worsened. He required emergency abdominal surgery at an old age, recuperated, but then suffered the same stomach bloat and twist problem again.

Grogan, a newspaper columnist, decided, after a period of intense grief, to write an article about Marley. "‘No one ever called him a great dog - or even a good dog. He was as wild as a banshee and as strong as a bull. He crashed joyously through life with a gusto most often associated with natural disasters...' There was more to him than that, however... ‘He taught me to appreciate the simple things...And as he grew old and achy, he taught me about optimism in the face of adversity. Mostly, he taught me about friendship and selflessness and, above all else, unwavering loyalty.'" (p. 279)

The column generated an avalanche of responses; fellow owners of bad yet lovable dogs wrote to the newspaper of their own experiences. These responses were cathartic to Grogan as he and his family learned to live without Marley, the dog who had taught them all so much: "the art of unqualified love." (p. 287)

View full annotation

Summary:

Manuela (Cecilia Roth) a nurse who works in a transplantation unit, witnesses the accidental death of her romantic son, Esteban, as he chases a car bearing the famous actress, Huma Roja (Marisa Paredes), from whom he wants an autograph. Esteban had longed to know about his absentee father, but his mother had always refused to tell him. His heart is transplanted, and Manuela is shattered by grief, leaves her work, and sets out to recover her past.

Obsessed with her son’s obsessions, Manuela trails the famous actress, Huma, who gives her a job. She finds old friends in the underworld, and a beautiful nun, Rosa (Penélope Cruz), who works with the poor and plans to go abroad. Soon it emerges that Esteban’s father is "Nina," a transvestite prostitute, and that Rosa is not only pregnant by him/her, she has also contracted AIDS.

Rosa’s austere mother was unhappy about her decision to become a religious, but she is even more horrified by her daughter’s pregnancy and illness. Initially reluctant, Manuela nurses Rosa and after her death, she adopts the infant son who is of course named Esteban.

View full annotation

Summary:

Fifty-something Canadian professor of history and lifelong womanizer Rémy (Rémy Girard) lies in an overcrowded hospital with a fatal illness. Family and friends gather, including Rémy’s estranged son Sébastian (a wealthy financier played by Stéphane Rousseau) from overseas, and Rémy’s ex-wife (Dorothée Berryman) and several previous romantic partners. Rémy and Sébastian fight painfully about Rémy’s philandering, but after a plea from his mother Sébastian decides to make things better for his father, even if they have not been reconciled.

This he does in many ways, most of which involve spending lots of money and many of which are highly irregular or illegal. For example, he arranges to have his father taken into the U.S. for an expensive PET scan that would have required six months’ wait to have free in Canada. And he arranges through Nathalie (Marie-Josée Croze), a childhood friend who is now a heroin addict, to provide a regular supply of heroin to control his father’s pain, which the hospital apparently is not able to do with morphine.

These and other extraordinary measures work for Rémy, and the process of caregiving brings Sébastian and his father closer. (Rémy’s only problem seems to be the feeling that his life has been wasted because he has not left his mark--and he gets help with that, paradoxically, through several conversations with Nathalie.) For his last few days, Rémy and ensemble move to a friend’s lakeside cabin, where the conversation is witty, intellectual, and sexually frank, and the mood upbeat and conciliatory.

In the face of Rémy’s imminent demise, all is forgiven, and others seem to gain insight about their lives. Rémy’s last act is peacefully nodding to a sorrowful Nathalie to begin the series of heroin injections that will end his life. In a final dig at the establishment, the heroin is administered through an IV provided on the sly by a hospital nurse.

View full annotation

Summary:

In a future society in which biological reproduction is restricted and humanoid robots ("Mechas") are routinely manufactured to supplement the economic and social needs of humans ("Orgas"), Dr. Hobby (William Hurt) creates a prototype child Mecha, David (Haley Joel Osment), who has "neuronal feedback," the ability to love, and "an inner world of metaphor, self-motivated reasoning," imagination, and dreams. David is given to Henry and Monica, a couple whose biological child Martin is incurably ill and cryopreserved, awaiting a future cure.

More specifically, David is created out of Hobby's own loss and given to aid Monica's mourning for Martin, whom she has been unable to "let go" of as dead. It is thus Monica (Frances O'Connor) who must make the decision to perform the "imprint protocol" that will make David love her. After she stops resisting the desire to love a child (of any kind) again and implements the protocol, Martin is unexpectedly cured and comes home.

The ensuing turmoil sends David, accompanied by a robot Teddy bear, out into a nightmare world of adult Mechas, comprised of both Rouge City, where functioning Mechas like Gigolo Joe (Jude Law) do their sex worker jobs and also the fugitive realm where unregistered, discarded Mechas try to find the spare parts they need to rebuild themselves and elude trappers who take them to reactionary "Flesh Fairs" where they are publicly destroyed as an expression of rage against artificial technologies.

Joe and David, both set up and betrayed by humans jealous of their superiority at performing human functions, join together on a quest to make David "real" and return him to Monica. The quest takes them to a partly submerged Manhattan and sends David and Teddy two thousand years into the future to resolve the dystopic narrative.

View full annotation

Summary:

Three childhood friends, now adult neighbors who have drifted apart, are brought together through the brutal murder of Jimmy's 19-year-old daughter. Sean Penn plays the grieving father; Kevin Bacon plays Sean, the plainclothes cop on the case; and Tim Robbins is Dave, a man deeply troubled following his childhood abduction and sexual abuse by two strange men. It's an important part of this film that the action takes place in a tough white working-class neighborhood north of Boston in a culture that seems to have no place for emotional problems like Dave's.

This leaves Dave alone with his agonies, feeling alienated from himself and living a kind of Jekyll-and-Hyde existence driven by a love-hate relationship with pederasty. One night he kills a child abuser, and then tells contradictory stories to explain the bloodstains he returns home with. Through a tragic misunderstanding, these things are connected with the death of Jimmy's daughter, and Jimmy turns violent and takes justice into his own hands. Shortly after, Sean finds the true killers, who confess.

View full annotation