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Healing words for tortuous times
REVIEWS BY DEANNA LARSON A true living nightmare is a terminally ill child, or a sudden, permanent disability. Our deepest fears are faced in two books documenting the tragedy and blessings often hidden in health crises.
The short vignette-shaped chapters in Don't Leave Me This Way: Or When I Get Back on My Feet You'll Be Sorry take readers on her gradual climb up to the relative paradise of semi-mobility, with a black humor that puts her temporary tragedy into perspective and deflates pompous doctors and nurses, strangers' nosiness, her own self-pity, and those who presume to tell her how she will or won't recover. Stories about trying to drag her paralyzed left side up the ladder of a swimming pool, persuading an instructor to renew her driver's license, and shameless visits to a priest and a comatose young girl reputed to have healing powers prove that attitude aids recovery and what doesn't kill makes one funnier. It's easy to figure out that the post-trauma Garrison is exceptional because of her response to her experiences, not in spite of them.
By Julia Fox Garrison HarperCollins, $24.95 336 pages ISBN 0061120618 Ars poetica
By Madge McKeithen Farrar, Straus, $22 240 pages ISBN 0374115028
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One morning Julia Fox Garrison kissed her husband, sent her child off to school and began a busy day at work; then she got a sudden excruciating headache. After waking up in a hospital bed, Garrison learned that she'd had a massive hemorrhagic stroke, possibly caused by an over-the-counter allergy medication. Rendered incapacitated at the age of 37, Garrison quickly learns that "memories can become a heavy burden, a reminder of how different the present is."
Sometimes broad black humor is required, and sometimes the suffering is too delicate for anything other than the most quietly astute words. Blue Peninsula: Essential Words for a Life of Loss and Change is an unusual hybrid of health memoir and "favorite poems" book, detailing former teacher, researcher and editor Madge McKeithen's struggle with her son Ike's mysterious illness. McKeithen is consoled by compulsively reading poem after poem ripped from magazines and books and tucked into thick medical files that she ferries from clinic to clinic while trying to figure out what is happening to her son. "I became a poetry addict," she writes, "poems became almost all I could read." Blue Peninsula features excerpts of works by Billy Collins, Donald Hall, e.e. cummings, Louise Glück, Mark Doty, Sharon Olds, Czeslaw Milosz and many others; their precise, concentrated wisdom becomes "at times near lifesaving" for McKeithen as she faces her son's uncertain future and herself as mother, diagramming the words and her own procession through isolation, frustration, sorrow and small slivers of light. "Do I have it in me to reach for Peace, Hope, even Delight?" McKeithen asks, referencing the Emily Dickinson poem that gives the book its title.