Every Last Breath: A Memoir of Two Illnesses

Jacobson, Joanne

Last Updated: Apr-11-2022

Schilling, Carol

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Memoir

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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Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer's, My Mother, and Me

Leavitt, Sarah

Last Updated: Mar-07-2022

Galbo, MA, MILS, Sebastian

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Graphic Memoir

Summary:

Sarah Leavitt’s graphic memoir, Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, My Mother, and Me, narrates and vividly illustrates the pain and difficulty of caring for a loved one with Alzheimer’s disease. Leavitt’s memoir shares her family’s experiences nursing their mother, Midge Leavitt, for six years following her diagnosis at the early age of 52. “I created this book,” Leavitt explains, “to remember her as she was before she got sick, but also to remember her as she was during her illness, the ways in which she was transformed and the way in which parts of her endured” (Leavitt 1). The memoir’s spare, black-and-white panels trace her mother’s deterioration from the first, seemingly innocuous symptoms (such as misremembering conversations and forgetting to unplug an iron) to the debilitating and tragic manifestations of Alzheimer’s, such as confusion, behavioral changes, aphasia, and ultimately, the inability to recognize loved ones. As greatly painful as these experiences were for Leavitt, she singles out from the murk and monotony of caregiving moments that inspire laughter, introspection, and gratitude. Early one morning, Leavitt’s mother wakes her to admire a fresh, “glittering” snowfall (86). On another occasion, Leavitt illustrates a rainstorm. Instead of keeping dry, her mother wants to stand in the downpour: “So finally we let go of her. She stuck out her tongue to taste the rain” (78). For Leavitt, humor brings, if not understanding, comfort when the stifling presence of her mother’s suffering goes momentarily unfelt. Caregiving also stirs recollections about her mother’s personality. Leavitt remembers, for instance, her mother’s love of Granny Smith apples: “She ate the core and stem and everything, crunching loudly” (23). She remembers her mother’s love of nature, “. . . plants, worms, rocks, soil. She did not seem separate from it as most people did” (93). Her mother also adores the poetry of E. E. Cummings and Robert Frost and Aretha Franklin’s music. Leavitt does not allow suffering to efface her mother’s personality, providing a poignantly moving account of how caregiving shapes memory and deepens family love in unexpected ways.

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Should We Stay or Should We Go

Shriver, Lionel

Last Updated: Aug-11-2021

Teagarden, J. Russell

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

Cyril Wilkinson and his wife Kay make a pact. On Kay’s eightieth birthday, when Cyril is already eighty-one, they will commit suicide together. Cyril, a physician in the British National Health Service (NHS) secured a supply of secobarbital as the means to their end. It was 1991. They have planned well ahead; another twenty-nine years will pass before Kay’s eightieth in 2020.

Motivating the pact was the death of Kay’s father after “a good four years of steady deterioration, followed by a solid ten of nothing but degradation” from dementia (p. 7). They had just arrived home from his funeral service, and were reflecting on what they had been through. At one point, Cyril says, “Your father frankly made me suicidal—or homicidal—or both. Half an hour in his presence passed like a mini ice age,” and then promises Kay, “I will do almost anything to keep the two of us from acceding to such a fate” (p. 12). But Kay is dubious.

That’s what everyone says...Everyone looks at what happens to old people and vows that it will never happen to them...Somehow they’ll do something so their aging will proceed with dignity...Everyone thinks they have too much self-respect to allow a stranger to wash their private parts...Then it turns out that, lo and behold, they’re exactly like everyone else! And they fall apart like everyone else, and finish out their miserable end of their lives like everyone else. (pp. 12-13)

And so Kay dithers over the next few months whether to agree to the pact, but once her mother begins showing signs of dementia; “I’m all in,” she tells Cyril (p. 17).

Cyril and Kay proceed through the subsequent twenty-nine years, with Kay raising their three children, retiring, finding new work and passions; Cyril going on and on about politics, the NHS, old people; and both watching their remaining parents pass on, traveling to far-flung locations, becoming grandparents, aging. Then the day arrives; happy birthday, Kay?

The novel structure is simple or complex depending on how a reader approaches it. The first chapter sets up the pact. The second chapter leads up to the day of reckoning and becomes the first story telling what became of the Wilkinsons’ plan. The next eleven chapters envision alternative scenarios unfolding from choices Cyril and Kay make before and on their pre-determined end date. Some scenarios stem from one or both of them not going through with their pact. Some scenarios involve recognizable and available options today, and some are wholly futuristic and unattainable. Some scenarios are happy, some are sad, all are unsettling. These chapters can read as independent stories offering different choices and endings. But they can also be read as interdependent and collectively building toward a point of view on the question: Should we stay or should we go?

The interdependence and complexity of the chapters arise from the through lines among them. From the third chapter on, for example, the first few sentences of each chapter are taken verbatim or slightly modified from some part of a preceding chapter. Other blocks of text appear in one or more chapters. One through line even extends beyond the book to another of Shriver’s novels (So Much For That). Kay and Cyril exhibit the same personalities and preferences, and express the same general hopes and desires through all the chapters. Other through lines are shared events or recurring arguments and debates; however, not always with the same outcomes.

The four years preceding Kay’s eightieth birthday overlap both the decision of the United Kingdom (UK) to leave the European Union (“Brexit”) and the Coivd-19 pandemic. Thus, during the time Cyril and Kay are deciding whether they will actually leave or remain on Earth, the UK is deciding whether to leave or remain in the European Union, and while Cyril and Kay are seemingly willing to die rather than fight the ravages of old age, millions of people are willing to fight the ravages of Covid-19 rather than die. These juxtapositions pop up often giving the Wilkinsons’ decision added poignancy.

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The Ministry of Bodies

O'Mahony, Seamus

Last Updated: Jul-26-2021

Miksanek, Tony

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Memoir

Summary:

Starting eight months before his retirement, a gastroenterologist chronicles a myriad of encounters between himself and others - patients and their family members, colleagues, administrators, hospital staff, and even drug reps. He has worked for many years at a large Irish hospital dubbed the "ministry." His professional work there is divided between the endoscopy unit (where he performs colonoscopies and EGDs), medical wards, an outpatient clinic, and the ER.

Given his specialty, the roster of patients tilts heavily towards gastrointestinal problems: alcoholic cirrhosis, GI bleeding, chronic diarrhea, and abdominal pain. But additionally, his days are filled with patients presenting with a variety of medical problems including pneumonia, mental health issues, heart failure, serious fractures, dementia, seizures, anemia, and cancer. He attends to many frail elderly folks in the emergency department. His interactions with patients range from intense to jovial, from unexpected to heart-wrenching. For example, a woman with chronic abdominal pain asks the doctor if she might be suffering from PTSD. When asked why she thinks that might be possible, her reply is "My son hung himself. I found him" (p191).

The doctor is beleaguered by frequent, and at times wacky, emails generated by the hospital bureaucracy as well as unproductive meetings. He must cope with his own health problems too (a vitreous detachment, arthritic hands, and unexplained nosebleeds). He decries the "foolishness" of excessive medical testing and overtreatment and cites the case of a young woman with irritable bowel syndrome who already had over 1,200 test results logged in the hospital lab. He describes the ministry as "an oasis of kindness and comfort" but "also a place of chaos and conflict, of institutional cruelty" (p8).

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The Father

Zeller, Florian

Last Updated: Apr-26-2021

Teagarden, J. Russell

Primary Category: Performing Arts / Film, TV, Video

Genre: Film

Summary:

The basic plot of The Father mirrors the all-too-common trajectory people with dementia follow: first they deny any problems; then they progressively need more in-home assistance; and then they require institutionalization. This scenario, however, gets obscured when watching the film’s main character—the father—wrestle with quotidian activities and familiar faces. The viewers wrestle with him, and become just as confused and rattled. Florian Zeller, the screenwriter and director, admits he wants viewers feeling what people with dementia feel. He succeeds in the movie as he succeeded in the Broadway play version preceding it.

The father, Anthony, lived in his London flat with help from hired caregivers and his daughter, Anne, who lived nearby. After Anthony banished several caregivers on grounds they were unnecessary, Anne moves him into her flat, and when he’s too much for her there, she moves him to a nursing home. We’re never quite sure, though. Zeller makes the two flats and the nursing home look almost identical. He changes Anne’s story at different times: she’s still married after ten years; she’s been divorced for five years; she’s relocating to Paris with a lover; she was never relocating to Paris; she relocated to Paris. Anne appears as a different person on occasion and the husband she may or may never had appears as different people. Zeller overlays these confusing surroundings and events by jumping forward and backward in time, and repeating some scenes with slight variations. Eventually, Anthony says, “strange things are going on around us.” Viewers will feel the same, and that’s the point.

The movie ends as Anthony awakes in his nursing home room. Just as we are lured into thinking we have returned to the common dementia trajectory at its end, we see his nurse is the person who had appeared as Anne before, and his room looks like the bedrooms in both his own and Anne’s flats. We wonder.

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Hair

Corso, Gregory

Last Updated: Apr-25-2021

Mahl, Evan

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Letter to a Young Female Physician: Notes from a Medical Life

Koven, Suzanne

Last Updated: Feb-26-2021

Miksanek, Tony

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Collection (Essays)

Summary:

In this collection of autobiographical essays, Koven contemplates some unique challenges confronting female physicians: discrimination, sexism, lower annual salary on average than male counterparts, possible pregnancy and motherhood. She recalls her medical school and residency experience, describes her internal medicine practice, and highlights her role as a daughter, spouse, and mother.

Worry is a theme that works its way into many phases of Koven's life and chapters of this book. The opening one, "Letter to a Young Female Physician," introduces self-doubt and concerns of inadequacy regarding her clinical competence. "Imposter syndrome" is the term she assigns to this fear of fraudulence (that she is pretending to be a genuine, qualified doctor). She worries about her elderly parents, her children, patients, and herself. Over time, she learns to cope with the insecurity that plagues both her professional and personal life.

Some of these essays are especially emotional. "We Have a Body" dwells on the difficult subject of dying, spotlighting a 27-year-old woman who is 27 weeks pregnant and diagnosed with adenocarcinoma of the lung. "Mom at Bedside, Appears Calm" chronicles the author's terror when her young son experiences grand mal seizures and undergoes multiple brain surgeries for the tumor causing them.

Listening emerges as the most important part of a doctor's job. Koven encourages all doctors to utilize their "own personal armamentarium" which might include gentleness, exemplary communication skills, a light sense of humor, or unwavering patience. She fully endorses a concept articulated by another physician-writer, Gavin Francis: "Medicine is an alliance of science and kindness" (p228).

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Elizabeth is Missing

Walsh, Aisling

Last Updated: Feb-16-2021

Teagarden, J. Russell

Primary Category: Performing Arts / Film, TV, Video

Genre: Film

Summary:

Maud’s dear friend Elizabeth is missing, suddenly. Maud’s dear older sister Sukey is long missing. And, Maud’s mind is missing more and more. These three facts and how they relate to one another form the matrix of this movie. Maud Horsham is an elderly widow living alone with help from a home health aide’s daily visits, and from an attentive, if occasionally resentful daughter and a loving teenage granddaughter. She is well into the inexorable decline dementia brings, but at a stage where the support in place and reminder notes she leaves around are enough to keep her functioning.

On a routine visit to her friend Elizabeth, and while they dig in Elizabeth’s garden, Maud comes across the top of a compact that immediately takes her mind to a scene seventy years before when her sister Sukey was applying makeup with what looks to Maud as the same compact Sukey had in her hand. This flashback starts the story of Sukey’s unsolved disappearance as a young adult. A couple of days later, Maud and Elizabeth are to meet outside the Salvation Army store where they both once worked. Elizabeth never shows.

Elizabeth is Maud’s only remaining friend, and Maud sets off to find her. Her search triggers many flashbacks and hallucinations from the time of Sukey’s earlier disappearance, which she then becomes determined to solve. Maud’s worsening dementia often frustrates her own efforts in these parallel missions and also causes family, friends, and officials to doubt her findings and assertions. The parallel stories each have twists, turns, and surprises all the while Maud’s dementia is progressing to where she can no longer live on her own. Nevertheless, Elizabeth is found, Sukey’s grave is found, but Maud’s mind is never to be found again.

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I Hear Their Voices Singing: Poems New and Collected

Davis, Cortney

Last Updated: Jul-24-2020

Donley, Carol

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Collection (Poems)

Summary:

Cortney Davis has divided this collection of her poetry into seven major sections which she calls “Voices.” The first and last sections are “Voices of Healing” which frame and wrap around the others: “Home,” “Desire,” “Suffering,” “Faith,” and “Letting Go and Holding On.” The sections include previously published poems as well as new ones. Davis is known for her ability to see and understand what is going on and to express that in ways that help the reader “get it.” This collection also shows her ability to hear the unique voices that express suffering, faith, desire—and to convey empathic understanding of the speaker. Sometimes she gets angry with the speaker. The poems range through time, from her childhood, nursing training, nursing experiences, deaths of her parents, to more current experiences with grandchildren. Throughout there is a consistent caring and compassion, mixed with many other feelings, many of them contradictory.

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Dr. Futurity

Dick, Philip

Last Updated: Jun-29-2020

Brinker, Dustin

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

Jim Parsons is a physician living in an alternate 2012, one equipped with technology mildly superior to our own. While on his way to work, his car is abducted from the road and thrown off the natural path of life as we know it, both physically and temporally. Parsons finds himself in the distant future, roughly three centuries from his own, in a monoethnic society of young beings that resulted after generations of war led by people of color against the white domination of the A.D. era. The true ideology of the society is revealed when Parsons saves the life of a political radical, a proponent of the re-outlawed women’s suffrage. As he is taken into custody and processed for the crime of preserving life, the leader of the society, Al Stenog, describes the societal fetishization of death resulting from government-controlled population limits. Natural birth has been outlawed, enforced via early sterilization of males and a strictly monitored, equivalent exchange of deaths and births. Genetic material is selected via a tribal selection process based upon quantifiable measures of beauty and intelligence, whereby the fertile matriarch of the dominant tribe becomes the Mother Superior from whom eggs are harvested. The eugenic ideology extends into one’s conception of self—those currently living believe themselves to be genetically inferior to the zygotes housed in the government’s central repository. As a result, the society is described as being an amalgamation of all races of color whose average age is 15.

Stenog exiles Parsons to Mars, but his transport is intercepted by the masterminds behind his time travel. This group, now the genetically dominant tribe, explains their motive—the revival of their ideological patriarch. He has been cryogenically preserved for 35 years following an arrow to the heart. Parsons manages to save his life, but the patriarch is shortly thereafter found dead, his heart once again pierced with an arrow. It is revealed that the tribe intends to systematically eradicate all European colonization efforts in history, intending to halt centuries of white oppression; the patriarch had been stabbed during his attempt to begin the tribe’s crusade with the elimination of Sir Francis Drake in 1579. Returning to that time, Parsons discovers two startling facts: Stenog had traveled back to replace Drake, implying that all colonizers were from the future, and Parsons was the true killer of the patriarch, albeit accidentally. Despite the ensuing fallout involving much time travel, Parsons is returned to his own time, spared from temporal exile by his future children spawned from the impregnation of the Mother Superior.

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