Of courage in the face of death

Of late, I have been reading quite a few books on loss and grief. It all began with a brief from the editor of Women's Web for an article on 5 Books To Read When Dealing With Grief. There were a few books that I had read, but not many seemed to fit in with the aspect of healing after a loss. I looked around the blogs I usually read - approaching Indian Home Maker about the books that helped her to cope with the loss of her daughter, Tejaswee. I also asked a blogger friend, Vibha Sharma for her inputs. These were extremely helpful in deciding the books featured in the article.

Here is one of the books I came across in my search. Also cross-posted at Zealot Readers.

pic courtesy kobobooks.com.au

Mick...Send Me A Butterfly
Written by Lorraine Grennan
Revised edition published by Love of Books Self Publishing.

Death is always disturbing.  Even if the person has passed away peacefully after a long and productive life. Even when it is of someone one knows only slightly. Even if it is the death of a loved fictional character. Even if it is someone one has never heard of before. What makes us react this way to a death? Why are we touched by the finger of sorrow even if we have not directly suffered this loss? Isn't it the realisation of our own mortality?

The everyday news items about deaths in the newspaper disturb me - I make it a point never to read these pages early in my day, especially if it is the death of a child or a violent death that is featured.

So when it is a dear one whose death we are dealing with, it can be devastating. And when it is a parent who has to deal with a child's death, it becomes doubly so. Somehow we expect to die before our children. It is, we feel, the natural order of things. After all, life goes on in a forward direction. Children are born of our bodies, and are our hope for the future. A way for nature to ensure that we do not disappear into nothingness. A way to keep a part of us alive on this beautiful earth. In a strange way, we become immortal through our children, and our children's children, and so on. So, it is terrible indeed, when things go the other way. When a parent has to see the suffering of a child, and the relentless descent into the big void of death. Whether it comes suddenly or after a long and debilitating illness.

Lorraine Grennan's book, 'Mick...Send Me A Butterfly' is a memoir of her son Michael Stewart Grennan's fight with Chronic Myloid Leukaemia. He was diagnosed with the disease on 29th August 1981, and passed away on 23rd March 1983 at just 20 years of age - a period of one year and seven months of facing the monster. 23rd March 2013, was the 30th anniversary of his death, and this is a tribute to his fighting spirit. One that has surely touched many lives that came in contact with his courage and forbearance.

At 18, Mick was your regular teenager, having a girlfriend and a job at a gas station, plenty of friends and a loving family. He had his whole life in front of him, when the disease crept up on him unbeknownst. It was diagnosed after a series of tests for symptoms that seemed like arthritis. It was a punch in the solar plexus, to put it mildly. Ms Grennan writes about how they all coped with the reality of impending death in their own ways. It was devastating, and something that they never could come to terms with. At such a time, Mick showed a maturity beyond his years and became the source of his family's strength, preparing them for his death and the time after it, in unusually thoughtful ways that Ms Grennan has put down with complete honesty of emotion. It does not fail to move, and I had to put the book away at times to bring my own emotions to order. She recounts the shock, the denial, the coping with the treatment (with its own consequences) and the bewilderment of a layperson thrust into the unending medical visits. She speaks of her faith and that of her family and friends, that gave them the strength to cope with the inevitable - both before and after Mick's passing away.

Ms Grennan also writes very honestly about the feelings of loss, guilt, and helplessness that overcame her and the other members of her family after Mick passed away. How every person grieves in a different way, a way very personal to that person, the way they perceive their loss, the way they deal with it. The way that coping with grief does not have a timeline, and that even after we learn to let go, the grief is still very real for the bereaved person. And that healing does come, in its own way to each person.

After his passing away, Ms Grennan was introduced to The Compassionate Friends, a group started by similarly bereaved parents, and it helped her deal with her feelings of grief. Intense feelings that she often wondered about- if they were normal. Ms Grennan has since worked extensively as a volunteer in its chapter in her hometown in New South Wales, Australia. Her work since has helped thousands of bereaved people come to terms with their loss.

This memoir, which is written in almost a diary-like fashion, draws the reader into their lives. A peek into the extraordinary courage of ordinary people. It has been a privilege.

Of rising above a parent's life-choices

How many parents think about how their life choices affect their children? I am not speaking of parenting choices here. I am speaking of choices that we make for our self, or those that are made for us by significant others in our life. How much will my not working, despite a professional degree affect my daughter's life? Would that bare fact mold her thinking, or will the reasons behind that make a difference? Will she be able to see things from my POV?

Speaking for myself as a daughter, I began to really understand my mother only after I became a parent, and a lot more as I am growing older. I can now look beyond the strict parent whose strictures I so resented to the woman behind the facade. She is an intelligent, strong, principled woman, unfortunately married into a family that could never understand her - yes, my father's side was, and still is strongly patriarchal, and has managed to stifle my mother. I have very recently begun to appreciate the fact that her choices were often not real choices, and a lot of what I remember was a function of the times she lived in. Of late, I have been having conversations with my father about how he could have done differently by her. He, too, I realise now, was a victim of the system, and actually thinks that things were fine. He listens to me, fortunately, me being the favourite daughter.

Children like to make up stories. Watch a bunch of kids play-acting and one is amazed at the imagination and creativity they come up with together. What if there is the possibility that the story might be real? What if the story turns your view of the world upside down?

Here's a book that made me introspect: what do my actions convey to my daughter? Do my unfortunate choices taint her life? Do the good ones uplift her? How much is it possible for a child to lift themselves above the effects of their parents' choices?

pic courtesy flipkart

Hitler's Daughter
Written by Jackie French
Published by HarperCollins Children's Books
Ages 8-12

Mark, Anna, Tracey and Ben play a story game as they wait for their school bus every day. They have stories of fairies, of ball games and of horses. Until one day Anna decides to tell a story. It is an amazing story set on the fringes of a great war. It is the story of a child growing up tucked away from all the action, a privileged child who is kept safe despite not being the blue-eyed, blond, tall Aryan ideal, a child hungry for family and love, holding on to memories of the few-and-far between visits of her father. A father who obviously is somebody important. Important enough that people around her who have always taken care of her are in mortal fear of displeasing him. We are told early enough that the child, Heidi, is Hitler's daughter.

Anna's story focuses on the genocide from the outside in, raising many questions in Mark's mind. What if one's parent or child has done something really evil- how does one deal with such a parent/ child? Does one love them regardless? Do the sins of our parents taint us irrevocably, or is there redemption? Do the actions of someone dear reflect on us as individuals? How does society look upon those who stand in evil's shadow? Is a bad thing really a bad thing, or are we just victims of our convictions? Do we have a right to raise our hand against someone else's questionable behaviour if we, too, might be in the wrong in our own time?

These are very profound existential questions, and Jackie French, (whom ST has interviewed here), in her inimitable chatty style, raises them through Mark's thoughts, without thrusting them at us. There are also references to Australia's own genocide-  the colonial actions against their Aborigine population.

It has been so realistically told that we are left wondering if Hitler indeed, did have a daughter that no-one knows about. Also, it is an unusual look at the Holocaust; a great book to introduce them to it, along with Number the Stars and When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit. There are no grisly portrayals of the deaths, as the point of view is of a privileged, though unfortunate girl.

This page-turner of a book was devoured by A in an afternoon. She has been, since, recommending it to many of her friends.

Cross-posted at Saffrontree.

Book Review: Nanberry - Black brother White

Pic courtesy harpercollins.com.au

Nanberry
Black Brother White
Written by Jackie French
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers, Australia
YA

It is the story of Nanberry, the 9yr old Eora (aborigine) boy whose life takes an unexpected turn when smallpox brought into Australia by the First Fleet carrying convicts wipes out almost his entire tribe. Surgeon John White, the fleet's surgeon, adopts him as a son, much to the chagrin of his housekeeper, who is surprised to realise that the 'native' is as much a human being as she is!

The rest of the book is a narrative told in the first person by the different characters.

John White, the surgeon of the First Fleet, and later at the newfound colony. A good man of strong convictions and a thirst for knowledge.

Rachel Turner, who survived a wrongly given death sentence and deportation to the convict colony. Who has rather genteel origins, and works as Surgeon White's housekeeper, and later becomes his emotional anchor and mother of his son, Andrew. Who later becomes one of the richest and well-loved women in Australia.

Nanberry himself- the black brother, who, blossoms under the love and care showered on him by his foster father Surgeon White, and Rachel, but is loath to relinquish his roots, and is unable to quite become the 'English gentleman' that his foster father wanted him to become. Especially after he finds himself a target of the other white people's prejudice.

Andrew White, the son, the white brother, who gets a privileged education in England, and becomes a hero in the battle against Napoleon.

Which, along with a handful more of characters, both English and Eora, makes for a kaleidoscope of emotions, motives, actions, stretching across a period of history from the first Bitish settlement in Australia in 1788 to after the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. A piece of history that is in many ways still taking a shape. We see the arrogance of the Europeans in their 'finders-keepers-owners' attitude which has shaped much of the history of colonisation. "Britain did not recognise the country as being inhabited as the natives did not cultivate the land, and were, therefore, 'uncivilized'. " We see the reasoning they used in their ruthless decimation of the original inhabitants of the Australian continent- the aborigines- and their relentless claiming of the land.

We see the utter bewilderment of the Eora who did not have the concept of  individual ownership of land and resources- through the voice of Nanberry Buckenau. Who, although fostered by an exceptionally enlightened man for his times, keeps his roots, and returns to his people and their ways from time to time. Even as a child, he refuses to answer to the English name given to him by his foster father, and responds only to his rightful name, Nanberry.

A piece of history that we know really took place, as there are written records of it. All the characters really lived, even Nanberry about whom there are records researched and listed in the bibliography by the author, Jackie French, whose book for children 'Diary of a Wombat' has been reviewed by me earlier. She traces her mother-in-law's ancestry back to the family into which one of Andrew White's daughters married.

In an extensive afterword, she says, "All history books are detective stories, and history writers must track down information and put it together exactly as a detective does....The events in this book are as true as I can make them. The first decades of the colony were an extraordinary and fascinating time. But there comes a point where a historian and author has to say, 'I don't know'. "


"Neither the English nor the Eora understood each other. In most cases, perhaps, they didn't want to...To me, now, Nanberry (Nanbree / Nanbaree in the records found) and Andrew White seem to be the first modern Australians, triumphantly accepting both sides of their heritage."

I will be entering this review for the 2011 Global Reading Challenge under Australasia, and for the Reading the World Challenge 2011 over at Papertigers.