conversations about medicine and life

“There’s no science for goodbye”

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Sue Wootton

Aspiring Daybook by Annabel Wilson describes a year in the life of a young New Zealander, Elsie Winslow, whose carefree travels in Europe are interrupted by a phone call:

A phone call in the middle of the night. Not a good sign.
Out of context, the wrong time, too early or too late.
Malevolent omen. So often the sound of bad news.

Aspiring Daybook

And it is bad news. Elsie’s brother has cancer. She boards a long haul flight, heading home to help look after him. Time, place, light – all these reliable fundamentals seem to be falling apart. “I’m on a plane, going forward in time, back into the past … Today is New Year’s Day, and it’s getting erased.” Elsie’s journal becomes a kind of touchstone, or navigation tool, for piecing together a new reality on the other side of this catastrophic news.  [Read more…]

And then … a story of caregiving and poetry

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Benita Helen Kape

Pat & Benita 40th anniversary (1993)
Benita and Pat on their 40th wedding anniversary, three years prior to Pat’s operation.

It all began when my husband Pat, always a keen sportsman, had difficulty walking off the course one morning after a round of golf with his mates. Within a week we were in Auckland Hospital and Pat was in the process of recovering from a major spinal operation. This was a school of learning neither of us ever for a moment thought we would have to face. Both of us were healthy, even seeming young for our age. Pat had been retired for two or three years, and I had only a few years of work ahead of me before I would join him.

Things didn’t go well; the operation took longer than expected. Pat was cheerful, a tone that wavered little until much later. He was a man who saw the best in people. Bravely he struggled with rehabilitation, and we returned to Gisborne. Several days later, he became seriously ill. Meningitis was managed and contended with. We are forever grateful to all the doctors, nurses and agencies involved in his care. [Read more…]

Knitting an anatomy of loss

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Michele Beevors

The Wreck of Hope
After Stubbs, The Wreck of Hope, by Michele Beevors, at The Forrester Gallery, Oamaru, New Zealand 2014

As adults we must all at some point endure grief, although the loss of a loved one affects each of us differently. For some people knitting can provide a lifeline that helps to process loss, a mechanism by which the knitter can deal with overwhelming sadness, and a way to mark off the time it takes to heal. This was my experience. Knitting provided me with a safety net and a way of reconstructing my life, a turn from the personal space of grief to the political realm of art.

Knitting carries with it the legacy of care (for it takes time to knit by hand), patience, empathy and love. Hundreds of knitting patterns have been passed down through generations, one to the next. Knitting can be a powerful metaphor for sustainability, continuity and remembrance, and also for loss.

I began by knitting a single human skeleton, and went on from there to knit a skeleton of a horse (a memory of a school museum visit), then a snake, a dolphin, kangaroos, emu, frogs and children. Thirteen years later, I am still knitting, and the work is ever more urgent.

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My father’s case

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Laurence Fearnley

Dr Fearnley's caseMy father intended to retire in September, when he would be turning sixty-two. On the fourth of July he came home from work in agony and went into hospital. He was told he had stomach cancer and he died on July the 23rd.

My father was a doctor and very tidy, without being fanatical. When he came home from the surgery, he always tucked his case in a dark space beside the foot of the stairs. He placed it carefully, so that it stood upright and was always parallel with the bottom banister. I doubt he ever took much notice of this, he just did it automatically. On the day he came home sick, he dropped his bag in the hall and ran up to his bed.

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The feel of not to feel it

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Lynley Edmeades

John Keats,portrait byJoseph Severn
Portrait of John Keats, by Joseph Severn

The feel of not to feel it,
When there is none to heal it
Nor numbed sense to steel it,
Was never said in rhyme.                 — John Keats

It’s not every day you get an email saying that a friend of yours has died. I’ve only ever had one. I’d moved from Wellington to Belfast three or four months before, and I hadn’t spoken to Nick, the sender of the email, for a good few months. I was excited to see his name come up in my inbox and, if I remember rightly, I was a little tipsy at the time. I’d been drinking wine with Sean, the Californian, who I’d brought home from a bar a few nights before, and who hadn’t left.

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