Examples of Good Writing: The Mercy Papers

A few weeks ago, I picked up a copy of Robin Romm's The Mercy Papers from the Oklahoma City Friends of the Library Book Sale.  The book is essentially a memoir of the last three weeks of her mother's life, as her mother died of breast cancer.  I believe her mother was 56 when she died, and Robin was not yet 30.  It was strikingly similar to my experience, except that her mother had known about and fought her cancer for 9 years, while mine knew about hers and fought it for 9 months.

While the book's overall writing showed a young author's work, and it could have been written better, it had some remarkably astute and well-written passages.  I thought I'd share those passages with you.  Some of the passages were chosen for their words, some for the images they conjured, and some for the perfectly honest portrayal of how I felt at that exact moment.

"My mother is the only person ever to love me selflessly and she is dying.  I need someone to drop everything, to come running." p. 71

"No one but my mother is here for me.  She is the only one." p. 73  (Written in juxtaposition to the household of people and dogs she lived in at that time.)

"Women stop their lives; they're programmed that way."  p. 74  (Struck me as particularly appropriate because, like the author and her mother's friends, I stopped my life and dropped everything I had to be with my mom in her last nine months.)

"We brush up against the end every day. . . .  The ticking of the clock has gotten so loud."  p. 74  (Discussing the anxiety of not knowing when death will come but knowing it is just around the corner.)

"If there's quiet, I will think only of my mother, whether she is alive, whether this time is just time I am not spending with her."  p. 75  (I took a trip in July 2009 to Martha's Vineyard and Maine, and during the whole trip I was overcome with thoughts of missing time with my mom.)

"But I need to go home."  p. 77 (The realization of her own stopping of her life to go be at her mother's side.)

"Her skin is going lifeless, though she still occupies it."  p. 80  (I remember my mom's skin turning very cold, clammy, and gray.  Although she was still alive, she was slowly slipping out of her body.)

"And I realize now, in the dark room, that I am not ready, that I will never be ready, that her death will change me even though I've understood that it's been coming for nine years.  And all the changes won't be hopeful . . . . Some of the changes will be only pain."  p. 83

" . . . because her movements and thoughts patterns are my own . . ."  p. 101

"And when my mom dies it will be crushing pain, a silence that will fill me and break me over and over again, daily, relentlessly."  p.101

"If we are going to use our tiny reserve of energy to strike up conversation with a strange, well, it might as well be with God.  No one else is useful.  Not that God is being very useful  -- up there punching buttons on his death remote, smirking away."  p. 124

"After she died, there will be hours and days and nights of missing her, of a pain that keeps us awake, gnawing at us.  It will have no answer, no antidote.  That will be our blessing."  p.  151  (In response to people telling her that death would really be a blessing.)

"My mother who is covered by a black bag up to her chin."  p.  176

"Now it would be the outfit I wore to my mother's funeral.  I would never be able to put that skirt on without remembering this moment . . ."  p.  184

"I knew about smell, the way it skips over your intellect, like the clicker with the amygdala, and indeed, it made me cry, though the tears felt jagged and unsatisfying."  p. 185-86.

"I am partly in that world.  But I have one arm in another place, a place beyond the wall, through that portal.  I can feel something creeping into the numbness.  A largeness.  A mystery."  p. 193

The Effects of Death

As I mentioned a couple of days ago, I recently got married to a remarkable man. We have dated for about two-and-a-half years, and during those years, the ride of life has been nothing but tumultuous. Part of what makes my husband so amazing is his steadfastness as life kept bucking me off its back. Just one of the difficult situations I lived with included my mom's diagnosis with stage IV endometrial cancer, the nine months of complications after the diagnosis, and her eventual death. My life had been changed, and I am forever deeper as a person because of what I experienced with her and with my father.

After my mom's death, I read numerous books on grieving, and I learned about the genre of death stories. I began to read them with my whole body, often sobbing deeply with empathy, sympathy, and grief of my own. At the age of 27, I understood what they were about. I understood the depths of the emotions and phrases used to describe the indescribable. The June 13 & 20, 2011, edition of The New Yorker includes an article by Aleksandar Hemon titled "The Aquarium" that describes the diagnosis, the the attempted treatment, and the eventual death of his ten-month-old daughter, Isabel. It is a moving account of what his family experienced, and I highly recommend the article for its story. In this posting, though, I want to highlight Hemon's really top-notch writing style with the phrases that so aptly described his points:

- ". . . [we] wept through the moment that divided our life into before and after. Before was now and forever foreclosed, while after was spreading out, like an exploding twinkle star, into a dark universe of pain."

- "We were far away from the world of farmers' markets and blueberries, where children were born and lived, and where grandmothers put granddaughters to sleep. I had never felt as close to another human being as I did that night to my wife."

- "But I'd been cursed with a compulsively catastrophic imagination, and had often involuntarily imagined the worst."

- "She has to construct imaginary narratives in order to try out the words that she suddenly possesses."

- "The words demanded the story."

- "The comfort of routines belonged to the world outside."

- "But we were far more comfortable with the people who were wise enough not to venture into verbal support . . ."

- "If there was a communication problem, it was that there were too many words, and they were far too heavy and too specific to be inflicted on others. . . . We instinctively protected our friends from the knowledge we possessed; we let them think that words had failed, because we knew that they didn't want us to learn the vocabulary we used daily. We were sure that they didn't want to know what we knew; we didn't want to know it, either."

- "There was no one else on the inside with us . . ."

- "The walls of the aquarium we were hanging in were made of other people's words."

- "I'd needed more lived. I, too, had needed another set of parents, and someone other than myself to throw my metaphysical tantrums."

- "And now my memory collapses."

- "How do you step out of a moment like that?"

- "Carrying, like refugees, our large plastic bags full of things, we walked to the garage across the street, got into our car, and drove on the meaningless streets to my sister-in-law's apartment."

- " . . . [we] were left with oceans of love we could no longer dispense . . . ."

- "Her indelible absence is now an organ in our bodies, whose sole function is a continuous secretion of sorrow."

- "Mingus is still going steadily about his alternative-existence business."

I particularly love the line about his memory collapsing --- it is so true. My memory indeed collapsed, but with lots of love and self-acceptance, it has struggled back to standing, just as I have. I cherish this article, and I hope the Hemon family can find peace.