Showing 51 - 60 of 552 annotations tagged with the keyword "Mourning"

Call the Midwife

Worth, Jennifer

Last Updated: Dec-15-2015
Annotated by:
McEntyre, Marilyn

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Memoir

Summary:

Many are familiar with these stories from the author's practice as a midwife among the urban poor in London's East End in the 1950s.  Each piece stands alone as a story about a particular case. Many of them are rich with the drama of emergency interventions, birth in complicated families (most of them poor), home births in squalid conditions, and the efforts of midwives to improve public health services, sanitation, and pre- and post-natal care with limited resources in a city decimated by wartime bombings.  As a gallery of the different types of women in the Anglican religious order that housed the midwives and administered their services, and the different types of women who lived, survived, and even thrived in the most depressing part of London, the book provides a fascinating angle on social and medical history and women's studies.

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Incarnations of Burned Children

Wallace, David Foster

Last Updated: Nov-23-2015
Annotated by:
Miksanek, Tony

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Short Story

Summary:

A pot of boiling water falls off the stove. A diaper-clad toddler screams. His mother cries hysterically. The little boy is standing barefoot in a puddle of steaming water on the kitchen floor. The father who was busy hanging a door rushes into the room and quickly assesses the situation. He places the child in the kitchen sink and runs cold water over the boy.The child's skin is scalded. The father swaddles him in a wet towel but the toddler shrieks as if he is still being burned. Suddenly both parents realize they haven't checked the diaper. It burns their hands when they take it off. The diaper is filled with hot water that has collected inside it. The parents wrap their son in gauze and handtowels. They take him to the emergency room where "the child had learned to leave himself and watch the whole rest unfold from a point overhead." (p. 116)

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Next To Normal

Kitt, Tom; Yorkey, Brian

Last Updated: Nov-18-2015
Annotated by:
Glass, Guy

Primary Category: Literature / Plays

Genre: Play

Summary:

Next to Normal is a musical, composed in a rock idiom.  

Meet the Goodmans, (father Dan, mother Diana, daughter Natalie) who on the surface resemble a “perfect loving family” like any one of millions.  However, from the outset we see that they are, in fact, a hair’s breadth from collapse:  Diana’s long-term struggle with bipolar disorder leaves her suffering uncontrollable mood swings.  Her illness fuels the chronic tension in her relationships with husband and daughter.  In addition, we learn that a son (Gabe), whom we initially believe to be an active family member, actually died years ago and his appearances represent Diana’s hallucination. 

As the show begins, Diana is undergoing a hypomanic episode that is resistant to treatment by her psychopharmacologist.  Discouraged by side effects and egged on by her phantom son, Diana flushes her pills down the toilet.  As she deteriorates, she visits a new psychiatrist who agrees at first to treat her without medication.  As she begins in psychotherapy, for the first time, to accept the loss of her son, she descends to a new clinical low.  At the close of the first act, after making a suicide attempt, she is hospitalized and agrees to be treated with ECT.     

By Act II, the ECT has effected great clinical improvement, with stabilization of Diana’s mood and no further hallucinations.  All this, however, has come at the expense of her memory.  As it returns, she becomes aware that what she most needs to remember, and process, are her feelings about losing a child.  In fact, we learn that she was kept from expressing them at the time because of concerns she might decompensate.  She struggles to make sense of all of this while remaining stable.  When she confronts Dan about Gabe, it is he who appears unable to discuss their loss.  She suddenly becomes aware that Dan has been enabling her in an unhealthy way.  She reconciles with her daughter, but realizes that in order to move forward she needs to get out of her dysfunctional marriage.  However, the door is left open on this relationship, for at the recommendation of her psychiatrist Dan enters psychotherapy.  

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Fire Shut Up in My Bones

Blow, Charles

Last Updated: Oct-11-2015
Annotated by:
McEntyre, Marilyn

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Memoir

Summary:

Blow’s account of growing up in rural Louisiana, exposed to negligence, sexual molestation, violence, and loss focuses on a child’s strategies of survival first, and then on sexual confusion, social ambition, and discovery of the gifts that led him to his life as a writer for the New York Times.  A major theme in the memoir is his learning to claim his bisexuality after years of secrecy and shame.  That emergent fact about his identity, along with moving to New York after a life in the rural South required an unusual level of self-reflection and hard, costly choices that challenged norms at every level.  His account of learning to assume a leadership role in a college fraternity and deciding to finally leave it behind offers a particularly vivid example of what it takes to resist perpetuating rites of humiliation and conformity designed to curb individuation.     

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Lament

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

Last Updated: Jun-11-2015
Annotated by:
Ratzan, Richard M.

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

Lament is a twenty-two line dirge in free verse with one rhyme, at the end of the poem, which is almost certainly intentional. The poem represents a mother’s terse lament over the death of the father of the two children whom she is addressing. More of a soliloquy than a dialogue, one receives the distinct impression that the children may not even be present as the mother announces matter-of-factly that their father is dead, that they must soldier on, and describes the manner in which she will distribute the coins and keys in his pocket to them. The final couplet succinctly sums up the poem’s sentiment:


Life must go on,
And the dead be forgotten;
Life must go on,
Though good men die;
Anne, eat your breakfast;
Dan, take your medicine;
Life must go on;
I forget just why.

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The Dying Valentine Godé-Darel

Hodler, Ferdinand

Last Updated: Mar-12-2015
Annotated by:
Aull, Felice

Primary Category: Visual Arts / Painting/Drawing

Genre: Painting

Summary:

Swiss artist Ferdinand Hodler painted his model and lover Valentine Godé-Darel in a series of drawings and paintings after she became ill and was dying of cancer (of the reproductive organs). For a painter of that time to focus his/her work on a dying individual over a period of many months (1914-1915) was highly unusual. In this painting, Valentine's head and face are seen in side view in the left of the picture. She is lying down with her head partly elevated and sunken into a pillow. Her features are bony with high cheekbones and a prominent nose. Her eyes are closed, her mouth open. Blue is a featured color, forming the background as well as tinting her face. Hodler also favored blue in many of his landscape paintings. The woman's head and face are carefully drawn but the pillow and bedclothes are sketchy, drawing the viewer's attention immediately to the dying woman and holding it there.

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L'Heure d'été (Summer Hours)

Assayas, Olivier; Binoche, Juliette; Berling, Charles; Scob, Edith; Renier, Jeremie

Last Updated: Mar-12-2015
Annotated by:
Duffin, Jacalyn

Primary Category: Performing Arts / Film, TV, Video

Genre: Film

Summary:

The elegant widow Hélène (Edith Scob) lives alone with her faithful housekeeper in the cherished family home – a rambling country property outside of Paris. For her seventieth birthday, all her children and grandchildren come for a brief visit. Emphasizing their perpetual absence, they give her a portable telephone the mechanics of which baffle her. “You must set it up for me, before you go.”Hélène takes aside her eldest, Frédéric (Charles Berling) to explain her wishes for the estate, pointing out the most valuable art objects and emphasizing that the family should not feel tied to the old and costly house. Frédéric doesn’t want to listen; she is too young, he claims. He loves the house and assures her that the family will keep it. Moments later, the families pile into cars and race off. With the new phone still unconnected, Hélène is alone again, smoking in the evening gloom. Six months later, they gather once more for Hélène’s funeral. Single and living in the United States, Adrienne (Juliette Binoche) is sulky and rootless. Jérémie (Jérémie Renier) is entrepreneurial and is planning to live in Asia. Neither want to keep the house, and both could use the money from its sale. Frédéric is shattered by their indifference to the family and its traditions, but he cannot afford to buy them out. His wife sympathizes and waits. He loses the negotiatons. Yet, being the eldest and the only sib in France, he is forced to preside over the sale and dismantling of the property he loves. 

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Woman with Dead Child

Kollwitz, Käthe

Last Updated: Mar-12-2015
Annotated by:
Bertman, Sandra

Primary Category: Visual Arts / Painting/Drawing

Genre: Etching/engraving

Summary:

A seated, cross-legged, naked woman envelops the body of a child. The limp child, head tipped far back, is clutched to the figure we assume is the mother. Her features are mostly hidden by the child's body--except we see one closed eye and her nose nestled into his skin. Also visible are her expressive eyebrows, which silently communicate her explosive feelings. With her strong arms--especially a strong, thick hand--she draws the child toward her even more tightly.Her embrace is all-consuming. The mother's muscular leg forms the base of the monolithic shape that confronts the viewer. Most of the lines the artist uses to shape and shade the forms are aggressive, taut, and meaningful, contributing energy to the surface. As a bit of relief from the overall grief, Kollwitz drew the lines of the woman's hair tenderly, and delicately rendered the boy's features.Beate Bonus-Jeep, Kollwitz's close friend, described this etching memorably: "A mother, animal-like, naked, the light-colored corpse of her dead child between her thigh bones and arms, seeks with her eyes, with her lips, with her breath, to swallow back into herself the disappearing life that once belonged to her womb." (Prelinger, p. 42)

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What the Dying Heart Says

Toomey, John

Last Updated: Feb-16-2015
Annotated by:
Miksanek, Tony

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Short Story

Summary:

The nameless narrator has been hospitalized for months. A terrible accident while driving his Jeep. He survived, more or less. The other occupants of the vehicle - his wife and two children - did not. He watched them die. A traumatic brain injury and locked-in syndrome have left him unable to communicate. Although his body is useless, he assures us that he is completely lucid and resentfully aware of his circumstances. He desperately wants to die and admits, "I am already dead with grief" (p. 245).

The medical team caring for him won't call it quits. The narrator's brother, Tommy, informs them that his sibling would not wish to be kept alive in his current condition. But Professor Carson, the attending physician, insists that treatment will continue because the patient is not dead. Only one doctor, a compassionate Croatian female intern, comes forward as an ally of the narrator. She wonders out loud, "What man would want to live? Now?" (p. 242).

Even as the narrator's physicians prepare him for a brain-computer interface, he voicelessly implores Tommy to "convince these bastards to let me go" (p. 244) - to no avail, of course. Dying of a broken heart and helplessly being kept alive despite a shattered one, the narrator is doomed to a survival he does not want and to remembering the gruesome loss of his family that he cannot escape.

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On Bittersweet Place

Wineberg, Ronna

Last Updated: Nov-18-2014
Annotated by:
Nixon, Lois LaCivita

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

This story centers on Lena, an immigrant teen from Ukraine, whose entire family has been traumatized and uprooted by family deaths during a violent pogrom.  Relocated to Chicago, in a tiny apartment on Bittersweet Place, the family struggles to survive in the years prior to World War I. Wineberg’s tale of disrupted life and resettlement is weighted by formidable issues that stretch beyond the ordinary range of family experiences. 

Lena, the intelligent, highly observant and resilient adolescent, narrates an unvarnished tale of survival for the extended family clustered together in this strange new world, but especially for herself.  While the family’s economic and financial circumstances are difficult, her own life is made worse by an unkind teacher, mean-spirited classmates, and hormonal impulses.  Her uncle touches her inappropriately, a favorite uncle goes mad, a cousin dies, and her mother, who is unfamiliar with the new world setting and mores, drives her crazy. 

Nevertheless, Lena is a clear-eyed survivor exhibiting a surprising toughness of character and determination. For example, her introduction to sex is far more direct than might occur with most girls of that time.  In addition, when her teacher fails cruelly to support her artistic talents, she shows amazing defiance.   When she discovers that her father has a beautiful female friend, undoubtedly a lover, her consideration of this circumstance does not render the crushing blow that might be expected.  In retrospect she is more adult, more mature than most young women might be in each of these situations.  She is a remarkable young woman with a spirited edge.

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