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The Lively Shadow: Living With the Death of a Child - Hardcover

Murray, Donald M.

 
9780345449849: The Lively Shadow: Living With the Death of a Child
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0345449843 ISBN 13: 9780345449849
Verlag: Random House USA Inc, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of My Twice-Lived Life offers a candid, poignant account of the death of his second daughter at the age of twenty from Reye's Syndrome, reexamining the grief and anguish of her death, its long-term impact, and its struggle to find acceptance and peace in his own life.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Donald M. Murray writes the weekly “Now and Then” column for The Boston Globe. Boston Magazine and The Improper Bostonian magazine selected him best columnist in Boston in 1991 and 1996, respectively. He is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of New Hampshire, which opened the Donald M. Murray Journalism Laboratory in 1997. His books include My Twice-Lived Life, Write to Learn, The Craft of Revision, Writing to Deadline, and Crafting a Life in Essay, Story, Poem.

Aus dem Klappentext

;Remembering may be a celebration or it may be a dagger in the heart, but it is better, far better, than forgetting. Donald M. Murray

It is the hardest thing anyone can face the death of a child. A tragedy that has affected millions also touched Donald M. Murray, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Boston Globe, twenty-five years ago. Now, for the first time, he fully expresses what he lost and learned in a book even more moving than his inspiring volume on aging, My Twice-Lived Life.

Lee Murray was Donald and Minnie Mae s middle child, one of three girls. An avid oboe player accepted by a prestigious conservatory, the family caretaker with compassion for everyone, a young woman with a devoted boyfriend and the whole world ahead of her Lee succumbed at age twenty to Reye s Syndrome, commonly considered a childhood illness. In The Lively Shadow, her fa

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1. The Gift I set the alarm for five-thirty every morning. If I sleep later, I may once more live this dream.

The nurses, doctors, and technicians move away from the bed where Lee, my twenty-year-old daughter, lies in a large room in pediatric intensive care at Massachusetts General Hospital. Lee has been in the care of gleaming stainless-steel machines, left standing where they have last been used. I’m sure my Lee has received the benefits of old-fashioned nursing—a damp cloth to her forehead, the covers smoothed, a gentle touch to her shoulder—but all I see is cold, effcient (but not effcient enough) medical technology, all I hear are the hums, beeps, and blinking lights of electronic monitors.

A large metallic gauge is screwed into her skull. It looks like something that should be attached to a factory furnace. Plastic bags half-filled with potions hang high above her with tubes that loop down like jungle vines to her right forearm. An inappropriate thought comes and passes swiftly like a midnight raid on a village: Lee would find humor in all this machinery—she always found humor in the commonplace—but she will never know all that has happened since she passed into a coma in the ambulance transferring her from Exeter Hospital in New Hampshire to this Boston medical center only four days ago.

I feel as alone as I felt crossing a snow field under hidden enemy eyes in my war years. None of the quiet, lumpily clad medical personnel is there to comfort me. The doctors trained to deliver bad news talked carefully, slowly, patiently, softly to us in the waiting room. Each of us—her sisters, Anne and Hannah; her boyfriend, Paul; her mother—has had moments alone with her. Now it is her father’s turn.

I continue to stand at a distance from her bed, where I can see the tubes discreetly hidden under the sheet that carry foul-looking waste into jars below the bed. I follow the wires that lead from her up to the monitors, reading each screen in turn. One shows firm, even, jaunty pulses. That is her heart. One runs a continuous flat line. That is her brain.

I focus on her face, which is as beautiful as ever to me, the face of a middle child who is like and unlike her older sister, like and unlike her younger sister. She is herself, always herself from the beginning, but I see her grandmother and her great-grandmother as if they were shadow photographs, memory pictures, that lay over her face. She is slightly turned away, and yet they led me to this side of her bed. Her cheek at twenty is a woman’s cheek, yet still baby soft. Her skin always seemed especially soft, right from the moment I first saw her, washed and cleaned before being presented to her father.

Lee appears untouched by all that has happened to her since she had a fever, took aspirin as she was instructed, fell terribly ill, was diagnosed with Reye’s syndrome, and was brought here, where all that could be done has been attempted. Her face is peaceful, ready to wake with a smile. She is as she always will be.

Lee will never grow old, never have wrinkles. Her hair will never gray. She will not grow beautifully into her life, as her mother has, wearing her living on her face. She will not marry Paul or anyone else; she will never have children, never eat another sloppy submarine sandwich, never read again, never laugh, never play her new imported oboe. I will never again hear Albioni being practiced over and over again from the other room. No Mozart, no Bach, no Lee.

I touch her hand, still warm, still alive.

“Lee, I love you. We did all we could. . . . Goodbye.”

I choke on my tears and make myself turn away. I nod the final permission to the staff. I have given her release as I gave my father the gift of death in this same hospital and, two years later in another hospital, gave my mother the death she had so long said she wanted. I see my mother in her corset in my childhood, striding about our flat, beating her fists, chanting, “If I had the wings of an angel, over these prison walls I would fly” while I wondered what I had done, what I could do. Well, I finally did it. And now I have done it again, to my daughter who did not want death but life.

I leave the intensive care unit, not even trying to dry my tears, nod to my wife, my daughters, the man who has become a friend but will never be a son-in-law, and then I am asked something. I catch only one word, autopsy.

I step back as if I had been slugged, then ask Lee what she would want, hearing her say in my words, “If it would help others.”

“It will.”

“Then do it,” I snapped.

I turn away from the doctor and stand alone, knowing without being told what I must now do. The social worker, a kind, gentle middle-aged woman, leads me down a long corridor, where everyone passing by avoids meeting my eye. She offers me her office, then asks, “Is there anything I can do?”

“Just get the fuck out!” I yell, shocked at how I’ve suddenly given in to rage, but not apologetic, not then. Her office is at the end of the corridor that leads to intensive care. I call information and get the number of the Deware Brothers Funeral Home, where one brother with a mustache like my uncle Andy’s is named Donald Murray Deware. They are Scots Protestant. In times like this we return to our own. The brothers took care of Grandma when I was overseas, then Father, then Mother, now Lee.

I look down the corridor, realizing that as I was dialing the funeral home, Lee was not dead yet. They hadn’t pulled the plug, turned the switch, or done whatever they did to the machines that had been giving my daughter artificial life.

I see her sit up on the bed laughing, hopping down from the bed, racing down the corridor to tell me it was all a joke. She isn’t going to die. She’s alive.

This is the nightmare I may dream if I sleep late, and so for the twenty-four years since that moment I get up in the dark, nod to Lee, and start yet another day of a life made more terrible, more valued since we let her go. Innocence

2. Conception At seventy-eight I watch my five-year-old granddaughter, Michaela, fiercely concentrate on her drawing, remember her mother drawing with the same intensity, then remember a book I found a few years after Mother’s death that was awarded to her for her drawing in school in Scotland, and wonder if this visual concentration they all share came from Scots fishermen who had to read the sea and sky a thousand years ago, maybe ten thousand. Grandsons Josh and Sam stage a mock fight with sticks picked up in the yard—lunge and parry, slash and counterslash—and I wonder how much this instinct has been passed down through me from the great-great-uncle for whom I was named who took a ball in the leg at Waterloo when he fought against Napoleon with the Black Watch. The last time I saw Grandma Smith, days before I went overseas in World War II, she thought I was that uncle from her childhood and that I was off to fight Napoleon, not Hitler.

Lee, conceived during the ridiculous and sublime act of love on a summer afternoon, was designed by genetic codes formed long ago by ancestors we cannot name because our lineage so quickly disappears into the unrecorded history before history. Back through her mother, Lee was descended from the Germanic tribes who survived on the vast plains that stretched across northern Europe. Some may have been tailors, Jews who came here to escape the army and the old cruel prejudices. Certainly when I see Minnie Mae on her knees planting a garden in the way I saw farmers plant in Germany, I know that many who came before her worked the land. Through me, Lee was the child of farmers and probably fishermen, all Scots,...

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Verlag
Random House USA Inc
Erscheinungsdatum
2003
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0345449843
ISBN 13 
9780345449849
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
193
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