Grandpa and the Kingfisher is author Anna Wilson’s sweet and gentle tribute to her father, whose favorite bird was the kingfisher. In this fictional pGrandpa and the Kingfisher is author Anna Wilson’s sweet and gentle tribute to her father, whose favorite bird was the kingfisher. In this fictional picture book story, Grandpa teaches his grandkid about the cycle of life through their observations of the kingfishers, and the food chain, mayflies, dragonflies, mating, raising chicks, and death, even as grandpa gets older and frailer. So it’s honest about life and death, following grandpa’s observation that nobody lives forever, as the kingfishers disappear.
I had just been researching kingfishers as I saw one the other day at a bird sanctuary, so I went back to my source to confirm that they live longer than Wilson implies (then see other reviewers also mention this in their reviews). The death of grandpa is, like the kingfishers, a sudden, abrupt, and unexplained disappearance, which will be confusing without an adult reader to explain it (you can download an audio version from the provided QR code, but I’d still suggest reading it aloud to a child).
But the idea of nature going on forever is positive, even if it is also true that we are losing species every day. But the point is to learn about and live in harmony with the natural world. I liked Sarah Massini’s illustrations a lot, especially the closely detailed and dramatic scenes of the kingfisher diving for fish. ...more
Artist Wendy MacNaughton was for a time the artist-in-residence at the Zen Hospice Project Guest House in San Francisco. She sketched residents and viArtist Wendy MacNaughton was for a time the artist-in-residence at the Zen Hospice Project Guest House in San Francisco. She sketched residents and visitors there and asked visitors (family, friends) what it was they do while there and why. Of course, few know what to do when around the dying. I know because I was part of the hospice experience with my mother, with almost all of her sons and daughters present, a gift I see now. And I have been around a lot of death and dying by now. Initially MacNaughton self-published 200 copies of her book and asked people just to pass it on, but when greater interest developed around the book, she expanded it to include an introduction by physician and author BJ Miller and adding a terrific list of resources, including children’s books on death and dying.
This book is kind of an illustrated book on how to say goodbye to your loved ones (if you get the chance!), what to do when you are sitting there not knowing what to do or say. She shares a framework of “the five things” taught to her by a professional caregiver, a model for having conversations of love, respect, using the words “I forgive you,” “Please forgive me,” “Thank you,” “I love you,” and “Goodbye,” leading hopefully to peace and reconciliation.
MacNaughton also shows us illustrations of her aunt, who she went through hospice with. The book is not about the lives of those dying, but focused on this transition, what caregivers can say and do, which maybe include for much time just sitting there, being present. Paying attention. As MacNaughton does with her art. I wrote poetry, kept a journal, trying to be open to the experience, learn from it. Keep it simple, I would say is the main point here: Say I love you, hold her hand, cry, sure. With my mom we laughed quite a bit, too.
As I am getting older of course I attend more funerals than weddings or graduations. All of us will, obviously. I like this guide and will suggest it for anyone dealing with dying. ...more
A lovely, touching, sad, poetic story of an assisted living facility nurse, focusing on her somewhat muted emotional life, and the corresponding emotiA lovely, touching, sad, poetic story of an assisted living facility nurse, focusing on her somewhat muted emotional life, and the corresponding emotional lives of her patients. Of course it is about grief and death and unfulfilled dreams. In muted blue tones. Kind of ethereal. Maybe close to 3.5 stars.
I also read another nursing care facility book, a memoir from the perspective of a daughter caring for her 90-year-old mother that can also function as a guide to many of the issues we all have to eventually face on this topic. That one is more practical....more
“Save your tears for when your mother dies”--Something Michelle Zauner’s mother tells her when she is crying from a fall; apparently it is a Korean sa“Save your tears for when your mother dies”--Something Michelle Zauner’s mother tells her when she is crying from a fall; apparently it is a Korean saying
Crying in H Mart by musician Michelle Zauner is not I’m Glad my Mother Died, by Jennette McCurdy, nor Mommie Dearest, far from them; nor is it even Dancing at the Pity Party: A Dead Mother Graphic Novel. Mother-daughter books abound, as do mother grief stories. And memoirs about mothers by daughters are as varied as one might expect. This one is about a mother the author adores, through and through. Okay, I’m stalling. I think Crying at H Mart is a solid memoir and very nice tribute Michelle Zauner makes to her mother, who died of cancer at the age of 47, when her daughter was 25. It’s a great title--though I expected a little bit of irony or humor in it--nope, just crying--and there’s a great Korean food-mother connection in it.
Most of us know and remember our mothers through the food they made for us. So we can relate, many of us. And Korean food is the best thing about Zauner’s memoir. Zauner (who is mixed-race) finds her way to her mother through food, especially in the first chapter--crying in a Korean grocery store chain called H Mart--and in the end, as she tries to make her mom’s signature dishes. The food stories and recipes are both relatable and interesting. I have a lot of index cards in my mom’s penciled handwriting on them and like to make her recipes, too, as I run my finger lovingly over her written words from decades ago. My mother is the person I loved (love!) more than anyone else on the planet. So it's not that I don't get mother love or food-love connections.
I know this is a popular book, and 126 of my Goodreads friends have reviewed it, most of them women, most of them giving it rave reviews and five stars, so I tiptoe through this review now to say it’s--for me--yes, sure, a good book, a good first book, but not a great one. I have as I enter old age seen a lot of death and cancer and have read a lot about both. I don’t know Zauner’s music--Japanese Breakfast? Psychopomp?--though I like her voice; it’s a nice voice, she’s a singer!--in narrating her audiobook. Maybe that would have made me connect to it more? I dunno. I just think it is generally solid, well-written, but unsurprising in every way. But I am happy so many people love it and of course find it relatable in their grief for their mothers....more
Short wordless comic that is bathed in melancholy and nostalgia; nostalgia, for cartoons and comics of the first half of the twentieth-century, and meShort wordless comic that is bathed in melancholy and nostalgia; nostalgia, for cartoons and comics of the first half of the twentieth-century, and melancholy because it involves loss and grief. Just look at the sad sack cover. Maybe most romance involves melancholy--the long unrequited, the unspoken, the missed connections. Miss Lonelyhearts. Charlie Chaplin.
The title invites you to take the hope bait, as our heart warms for this lonely grieving man who puts flowers on the grave of his wife every week. Then things take a turn I will invite you to discover for yourself. It's a simple, ultimately unsurprising story, possibly a cliche for some, but I think more will find it moving, as Crane achieves his aims by stripping things down to simple, bare images, in a two-color format. I liked it very much....more
A short and what it appears to be a quickly sketched and lettered story of a man accompanied by a boy throughout, going through his past when he used A short and what it appears to be a quickly sketched and lettered story of a man accompanied by a boy throughout, going through his past when he used to catch frogs, alternating with images of him in a hospital bed. At turns nightmarish, surreal, touching, maybe bit too much on the nose in terms of its point and ultimately unsurprising, but you know, it still features the (often wordless, yay!) storytelling of Lemire, and that is always worth paying attention to.
This one is more in the Essex County realistic world of Lemire than his sci fi/horror worlds, and it is yet another of his meditations on fatherhood, as the older man regrets his having worked hard all of his life and neglected the son he now no longer really knows. This is written by the incredibly productive hard-working Jeff Lemire who actually also has a son. . ....more
Marissa Moss is the author of more than 40 books, most of them in her fictional children's series, Amelia's Notebooks, about what it means to be a girMarissa Moss is the author of more than 40 books, most of them in her fictional children's series, Amelia's Notebooks, about what it means to be a girl at nine or ten, and so on. I had recently read her story of baseball in Japanese internment camps during WWII, Barbed Wire Baseball, and liked it, but this is a very different subject for her: The story of her husband's decline and death from ALS, or Lou Gehrig's Disease, and it is really well and powerfully told, with searing honest.
Everyone in the family handles the disease differently, but as Moss tells it, the most painful part of it for her was the separation between her and her loving husband that happens almost from the beginning. He's angry as hell, and whys shouldn't he be?! How would you handle it? Sometimes life challenges make you come together, but sometimes you fall apart, and maybe it's useful to know this so you can be prepared for your own emotional reactions to trauma.
Sure, it's about ALS, so as you can imagine it is nasty, brutal, and inexorable, and sure, it is sad, but my main emotional reaction was admiration for Moss's storytelling. I want to thank her for taking the time to tell her family story; it is very useful in helping us see (or remember, for some of us) the emotional effects of serious illness on a family. I highly recommend it. ...more
Desjardins was encouraged by a ten-year old to write a cancer story with a happy ending and so here it is. Would you be more or less likely to read itDesjardins was encouraged by a ten-year old to write a cancer story with a happy ending and so here it is. Would you be more or less likely to read it if she had just titled it A Story About Cancer? This story, fictional, deals with a girl of fifteen who has been living with cancer since she was ten. The story begins as she and her mother and father walk to the doctor's office: "In just a few minutes, they're going to tell me how much time I have to live."
The narrative trick Desjardins plays at this point is to delay your hearing the answer until the very end. Periodically she returns to that long slow walk to hear the news, but we already know how it ends. It's like a Bunuel film, we walk, then we do something else, and then we walk again, and then we do something else, and then we keep on walking, seemingly endlessly. And walking to what? Whatever comes.
What we learn in this spare, evocative graphic story that also seems like a cross with a picture book for all-ages is what it feels like a young person to be living with cancer. How helpless you feel in each trip to the doctor. One nurse suggests that having a positive attitude is better for her and all around her, but many days she just thinks about what it will mean for her to die. That is always with her. She also thinks about her struggles with what seems like peripheral details such as the colors and smells of hospitals. Who knew interior design would be an obsession in a life or death story, but who loves hospitals, why should that be a surprise.
In the process she loses her best friend in the hospital to cancer, so of course, death is all round her and not just in her imagination. She also meets and falls in love with a boy, which makes things easier, in many ways, of course. At one point she is asked by her doctor how she is doing and she says she feels a little nauseous and dizzy lately. When? All the time, or in particular circumstances? "I told her that I almost always felt that way when I was with Victor. . . Anne burst out laughing and crossed out the notes she had just written. Then she turned to me and whispered, 'It sounds to me like you're in love.'"
I like the elegant, muted watercolors of Marianne Ferrer that promote reflection and a range of emotions, mostly leaning to hopeful. Because this is what Desjardins and Ferrer are also trying to tell us, if we get sick, as difficult as it is to hear, that being hopeful, that helps. I like the little Chagall moments Ferrer conjures--ach, that flying kiss near the end, so sweet!--and a few Matisse-like cut-outs, too.
Here's a happy, hopeful ending: Eight out of ten children who are diagnosed with cancer today are cured, Desjardins says.
And here's another happy ending: That ten-year-old girl who asked for the cancer story with a happy ending? Well, she lived long enough to read it; she also shared with Desjardins that she developed a relationship with a boy during her struggles with cancer, and the best yet: She's still alive, as of the printing of this book. That's a happy ending....more
“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of the heart. I am, I am, I am”--Sylvia Plath
“We are, all of us, wandering about in a state of obli“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of the heart. I am, I am, I am”--Sylvia Plath
“We are, all of us, wandering about in a state of oblivion, borrowing our time, seizing our days, escaping our fates, slipping through loopholes, unaware of when the axe may fall”--Maggie O'Farrell
So, writers always talk about hooks that “catch” readers; we have Captain Ahab sailing the High Seas for the White Whale in Moby Dick; Wisconsin Death Trip looks at all these bizarre and horrific murders there and becomes a bestseller. I love love love the hook (and the attractive cover, that helps sell books, too) in this book and can’t imagine that most readers don’t begin thinking of times they have had brushes with death. My quick list is below, and yeah, if she had a blog or website for readers to post their own brushes with death, I would elaborate and post mine, which I began to list even before I opened the book.
This collection of essays by the author tells of times she has almost died, or has had “brushes” with death, though she ends the book with the story of keeping her daughter--who had/has some vicious version of anaphylaxis--alive. Oh, and the childbirth and miscarriage ones! So it’s not about death, so much; it’s not about grief, but near-death. Not all of them are equally compelling, but she’s a good writer, and the telling helps her appreciate life more, instead of her getting paranoid that she is going to die at any moment. Oh, she knows she is going to die, but she knows more acutely as a result that she is alive.
“I swam in dangerous waters, both metaphorically and literally. It was not so much that I didn't value my existence but more that I had an insatiable desire to push myself to embrace all that it could offer.”
“That the things in life which don't go to plan are usually more important, more formative, in the long run, than the things that do.”
The best ones include the first one about being stalked by a disturbed guy (who turns out to be a killer) while hiking, two stories related to her survival and permanent damage from childhood encephalitis. This isn’t a perfect book, but it makes one think and feel.
Mine: 1) Burst appendix during surgery when I was seven
2) Bike accident last year where I swerved to miss the rear end of a truck and flew over the handlebars of my bike to face-plant on the sidewalk (I really just got beaten up and lost a front tooth, but as they say, it coulda been worse)
3) Chased by a brown bear in Yosemite at the base camp for climbing up Half Dome (not the face, just up behind it, something many tourists do), in the seventies
4) A few years ago tripped over a short garden fence and my chest was the first things that met the sidewalk, breaking a few ribs
5) In the nineties I had over seventeen tests for a bizarre fast-spiking fever that kept me out of work for three months; Doc, at the end, said: “The good news is that you are alive; the bad news is that we don’t know what you had.”
6) This is not one most people would mention, but it comes up in nightmares still; I was pulling out in traffic from a steep downhill Seattle side-street and a semi was barreling down that busy main street and I got distracted, took my foot off the wheel and inched forward and just barely managed to stop in time before hitting him and killing the whole family. VERY close, trust me, inches. That’s how close, in a car, many people have been, I know, but that is my strongest memory of a driving scare
7) Was beaten up badly in middle school by a gang whose leader I turned in to the principal for his having taken my new bike and smashed it on the pavement. His revenge was to beat me up; my revenge on him was that he accidentally killed himself with his father’s shotgun the following summer.
8) Maybe fifteen years ago the doctor said I was a heart attack waiting to happen; the usual: Overweight, high bp, high resting heart rate, high cholesterol, all that. I became a runner and changed all that.
9) I was on a visit to be considered by a university for a teaching position. They flew me in to O’Hare. But I recall a terrifying free-fall dive in the plane during a storm, with the roughest landing ever, people thrown around the cabin and screaming (as also happens to O'Farrell). Then, on the way back to the airport the engine of the cab I was riding in burst into flames and as he quickly pulled over I dove out of the car (No, didn’t explode, but neither did I get that job; bad karma?)
10) I was at Boy Scout camp in Michigan--Camp Shawondasee near Duck Lake, trying to finish my Rowing Merit Badge. The last thing I needed to do was be fully clothed, swamp the boat and still manage to get it to shore, but I got separated from the boat, it was windy, it floated away, I couldn’t make it to shore with the heavy, wet clothes, and had to wave my hand to the lifeguard and be rescued. I was more embarrassed than scared I was going to die. But it still counts, I could not have swum in by myself.
11) I’m embarrassed about this one, too, and really so, but on that trip where I almost crashed into a semi, above, I also lost my front brakes (yeah, one of my front brakes) on the pass from Grand Lake, Rocky Mountains down to Boulder. Weekend, no gas station anywhere near, family in car. I elected to use my parking brakes (and the three other brakes, I still had them!) to ease my way down the mountain at very, very slow speed, screeching all the way. Stupid, I know. I would delete this because it makes me look like such a jerk to have taken that chance, but O’Farrell is honest, so I will be, too.
Update, October 13, 2024: And 4 years later, I have survived serious melanoma surgery and gall bladder removal, though the latter only sounds life-threatening....more
Raymond Carver was one of the best short story writers of all time. He came from a chaotic working class family, with aThe Human Heart, That Old Port
Raymond Carver was one of the best short story writers of all time. He came from a chaotic working class family, with a violent alcoholic father. He himself pretty much destroyed his life through alcohol abuse, and many of his stories emerged out of that life and his experiences with AA. He was married at 19, had three kids by the time he was 23, and early on admits he took on “full-time drinking as a serious pursuit.” He was dead by fifty, but ten years before he died he gave up booze, and met the poet Tess Gallagher. This poem is in the collection A New Path to the Waterfall, his last book, a collection of poems:
Gravy
No other word will do. For that’s what it was. Gravy. Gravy, these past ten years. Alive, sober, working, loving, and being loved by a good woman. Eleven years ago he was told he had six months to live at the rate he was going. And he was going nowhere but down. So he changed his ways somehow. He quit drinking! And the rest? After that it was all gravy, every minute of it, up to and including when he was told about, well, some things that were breaking down and building up inside his head. “Don’t weep for me,” he said to his friends. “I’m a lucky man. I’ve had ten years longer than I or anyone expected. Pure Gravy. And don’t forget it.”
I was never a big fan of Carver's poetry, but I was rereading some of his short story collections recently and at a used book sale found a copy of this beautiful boxed hardcover edition of his poems, just 200 copies of the edition produced posthumously and signed by his wife Tess Gallagher (mine’s #95; I knew you just had to know). It’s a gorgeous artifact, in other words. I soon after read a lovely review by Ilse of another collection of his poetry, so immediately began reading this. Synchronicity! Sometimes there is a time when a book is just telling you to read it. It gave me the opportunity to re-evaluate his poetry and see him again, at the end, still writing, facing death.
In short, I think this is Carver’s best collection of poetry. Gallagher, in her fine introduction, argues for Carver as poet, though early on he admits he just wrote poem-like things when he wasn’t doing the thing he really wanted to do, fiction. These are often story poems, but there’s a lyricism here and there in these poems that I didn’t find in his early poetry. His basic writing aesthetic is a kind of brutally honest realism, no sentimental affectations or flowery prose. Tough. And he keeps to that here, largely, but he’s somewhat softened by the love of his life in his last years, I think. Here he speaks of resources he turns to for his poems:
“It was all or nothing. Lightening, water, Fish, cigarettes, cards, machinery, The human heart, that old port Even the woman’s lips against The receiver, even that. The curl of her lip.”
This follows in part from the advice of his mentor, Chekov:
“Be sure not to discuss your hero's state of mind. Make it clear from his actions."
That old saw: Show, don’t tell.
Well, I don’t love all the poetry, but I like in these late poems the better blending—for my tastes—of the lyrical with the commonplace, of the straightforward, no-nonsense language with the sudden spark of insight. The poems sometimes echo the force of his best stories. There’s heart in them.
One of the most fascinating aspects of this particular book is the conversation it has with other writers throughout, though especially Chekhov, placing excerpts from his and other writers’ works between some of the poems. Maybe when many of us read, we read with our lives, we weigh our experiences against what we read, we heal ourselves sometimes through reading, as Carver certainly shows that he did in and through this book. In this collection, Carver teaches us how to face the darkness, with love and grace. In the process he visits with what seems to me honesty some of his past experiences—with his father, his ex-wife, his son, all those drunken nights—and his present struggles with cancer, revived every day by the writing, and by Tess, as he would seem to suggest in this selection from Chekhov:
“. . . and with a burning pain in my heart I realized how unnecessary, how petty, and how deceptive all that had hindered us from loving was. I understood that when you love you must either, in your reasonings about that love, start from what is highest, from what is more important than happiness or unhappiness, sin or virtue in their accepted meaning, or you must not reason at all.”...more