A piercing, heartbreaking reminder that “loss doesn’t end.”
Poignant account of a young woman’s struggle to accept a parent’s dying.
Describing the hardship of watching her mother Jackie slowly succumb to breast cancer after a nine-year battle, Romm (The Mother Garden, 2007) immediately makes it clear which side she’s on: life, at any cost. Throughout this brutally honest account of Jackie’s final three weeks, she derides the hospice and its workers who “build the boat of morphine and pillows” to death. By contrast, she clung to every shred of possibility, every technique or piece of furniture that could prolong her mother’s life and give Romm back the strong woman who raised her. Into her chronicle of these last weeks, the author weaves details of her own life, which was tinged with cancer’s long, erosive mark; her mother was diagnosed when she was just 19. Romm examines her childhood, work and relationships, at times using their reactions to Jackie’s illness as a barometer, at times allowing the cancer to influence her perspective. The author and her father, both tense with grief, weren’t always in agreement as they grappled with the impossible task of doing what’s best for a loved one in pain without sacrificing a single moment of connection. At times, the only bright spot for the author was her new puppy, a bystander to the heartache with an irrepressible joy for life. Romm bemoans the world’s inability to guide us during a time of loss. “Much gets said about healing, but what of the violence of the actual event?” she writes. None of the hospice’s CDs or pamphlets, she found, offered anything but clichés. In response, the final chapter includes 12 blank pages meant to represent one woman’s ordeal as unique and yet collective.
A piercing, heartbreaking reminder that “loss doesn’t end.”Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-6788-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2008
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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