Memoir - Corpus

My father’s case

28 May 2018 2 Comments

Laurence Fearnley

My 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 23^rd.

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

21 May 2018 1 Comment

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.

Bird bath in Ward 6C

14 May 2018 7 Comments

Elizabeth Brooke-Carr

Taking a shower is a personal affair, the bathroom a place of privacy. However, there have been occasions where I’ve willingly shared the intimacy of cubicle, warm water, soaping and sudsing with a carefully chosen companion, modesty overwhelmed by steaminess. It may not save much water but it does have a softening effect. Recently, after body-disfiguring surgery, I was invited to take a shower with someone I had known for only a few hours. No preamble or compliments. No time for coffee and a chat. No opportunity to take in a movie or a show, or to go for a slow, moonlit ramble along the banks of the Leith. Nor was there any suggestion of a long-term relationship. Just a towel over her arm and a seductive smile that glowed inside the boundary of bed curtains.

‘How about it?’

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Living in the A zone

7 May 2018 2 Comments

Kaitrin McMullan

When my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, I had the good fortune, as a storyteller and dabbler in the arts, to be able to give up poorly-paid work and move into a kind of early retirement … albeit with an elderly dependent. Swapping poverty for poverty, not too hard! The rational was that we (my partner and I) would move in and care for Mum while her brain still lived at the same address as her body, in order to make the most of these precious years, much as some people decide to devote time to their children’s early years, only in reverse. Luckily Mum’s disease has progressed very slowly and in a benign way, and we now find ourselves in a four-generation “compound” with family living next door and a rainbow gate connecting the two houses.

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SSRIs: the battle of the narratives

7 May 2018 2 Comments

Heather Bauchop

British documentary film maker Katinka Blackford Newman’s 2016 book, The Pill That Steals Lives, opens with a nauseating story: a mother kills her eleven year old daughter and ten year old son, and then turns the carving knife on herself. She wakes in the secure unit of a private psychiatric unit convinced that there are cameras trained on her every movement. She’s on suicide watch and diagnosed with psychotic depression.

The mother in the story is Katinka Blackford Newman. But it turns out she didn’t kill her kids – she hallucinated killing her kids. Newman had had a toxic reaction to a selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressant.

Who is telling the story here?

30 April 2018 1 Comment

Liz Breslin

In 2016, Liz Breslin was concussed. This is the third part of her ‘Diary of a Concussion’, an occasional series that documents this experience. See below for where to read parts 1 and 2.

I nearly give up. Twice. The first time I am sitting by the window at home, hand over my ear which still has a strange thudding lack of unlocated feeling that the doctor couldn’t find with her little hammer light thing and I can’t find the words for. Dull? Numb? Dumb. I feel so dumb. Stupid, stupid me.

The second time, I’ve driven to the city for the day because of the little white envelope of hope that said the neurologist would see me. A long time coming and a long time driving but that’s OK because, answers. Because, something. Because, someone.