Corpus - conversations about medicine and life

Moments of magnitude

19 February 2018 2 Comments

Sandra Arnold

4 September, 2010. 4.35 am. Wild horses stampede through my dreams. The earth trembles beneath their feet. The earth is shaking, cracking. Imploding. A plane is plummeting from the sky.

Chris’s voice above the din: “What the hell…?”

Then we’re lurching across the floor. Switch on the light. Nothing. Pitch black night. A giant fist picks up the house and slams it back down. And throws it sideways. The floor, the walls are rattling. Glass shattering. A vortex of sound fills every room. The dog! Get under the bed! But the dog! Bookcases are falling. The earth is heaving. Here. Now. Under us. This is it. We know it now. The Big One. [Read more…] about Moments of magnitude

A scoop of chips and a pinch of enlightenment

12 February 2018 4 Comments

Annette Rose

In my humble suburb there is a chippery. In fact, a more humble chippery couldn’t be found: a simple roughcast building with a slop of paint applied to its walls and only an ‘A’ certificate to reassure customers it’s safe to eat there. It’s nearing lunch time and I’m feeling a mite peckish. The chip man springs to attention behind the counter as if expecting me.

“I saw you coming,” he says.

“A scoop of chips, please,” I say, and hand over my two dollars.

His face lights up as if my order is a big one, not a tiny little one. As soon as the chips hit the singing fat he starts telling me a story, not a story to stimulate the appetite, mind, but one to cast a spell …

Firewood: it warms you more than once

12 February 2018 Leave a Comment

Pat White

There’s an old saying about firewood:

It warms you more than once.”

Maybe even three times, or nine, depending on how you count it. A tree has to be cut. Next it may have to be shifted, or cut into lengths for splitting. The lengths have to be stacked somewhere, before the splitting axe is brought into action. Once splitting is finished the firewood has to be stacked again and stored somewhere dry to wait for burning. When days are cold, wet or frosty during the winter months, loads of firewood will be taken from their shed to the fireside. Only then does the burning wood in the grate provide warmth to all. In the meantime, those people involved in the gathering process have managed to be warmed several times over.

“Undying: A Love Story” by Michel Faber

12 February 2018 1 Comment

Sue Wootton

Michel Faber is the award-winning author of several novels and collections of short stories, among them The Crimson Petal and the White, Under the Skin and The Book of Strange New Things. Born in 1960 in the Netherlands, Faber’s family migrated to Australia in 1967 where he was educated and for many years worked as a nurse. Faber now lives and writes in the Scottish Highlands.

In 2014 his wife, Eva Youren, died from multiple myeloma. Undying: A Love Story is a collection of poems that chronicles Faber’s grief. He wrote two of the poems while Eva was very ill, and most of the rest on the other side of her death, in the strange new world of bereavement – “a world”, he writes, “that did not have my dearest friend in it”.

I hadn’t known such need for poetry before. I wish I’d lived into my nineties, with Eva at my side, and never written these things.”

One afternoon in the secure dementia unit

5 February 2018 4 Comments

Ian Anderson

I punch in the code to get into work, and go to put my dinner in the office. Mrs O stands blocking the doorway. “Excuse me dear, I need to get in there for a minute.”

“Piss off, I’m not going anywhere with you.”

What a great start to my shift.

Books beyond loss

5 February 2018 Leave a Comment

Kirstie McKinnon

Loss is like a current. Like fish, we respond with instinctive movement, ending up where we’re going but not, perhaps, where we intended. For some writers, the waterfall propulsion of grief channels, over time, into extraordinary work. Here are some books eloquent on loss, but greater than that, they reveal nature, character and a profound sense of being in the world, being part of it.

H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald (Vintage books, 2014. Winner of the 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize and 2014 Costa Biography Award.)

The ignition point for H is for Hawk is the death of the author’s father. Macdonald is propelled by grief into a broken English landscape, wild as the bird she takes there to tame. Woven into the story is a biography of writer and would-be falconer T. H. White, which gives the narrative depth and mirror.

[Read more…] about Books beyond loss