Memento Mori

"He drew open the two bottom drawers and found little of immediate interest.  There were boxes of writing-paper and envelopes, notepads, a wooden box containing a collection of ballpoint pens and, in the bottom drawer, two folded hand towels and a toilet bag containing soap, a toothbrush and toothpaste.  A smaller zipped bag held Venetia Aldridge's make-up, a small bottle of moisturizer, a compact of pressed powder, a single lipstick.

Kate said:  'Expensive but minimal.'


Dalgliesh heard in her voice what he himself had so often felt.  It was the small chosen artefacts of daily life which produced the most poignant memento mori. "


--P.D. James, A Certain Justice (1997)


Is it true that the most quotidian material objects most aptly characterize and memorialize a person?  Or is it the keepsakes and treasured objects?  Or is it those meant for public exhibition and display--the furnishings, paintings, hard-covered books?   While all such objects say something about a person, I suspect that murder mystery writer P.D. James correctly discerns that everyday material culture--particularly items such as toiletries which are most intimately in contact with a body--are the most revelatory. 


James also interestingly adapts the meaning of memento mori in this passage.  Typically, such "reminders of death" are meant to underscore life's brevity and to remind the living that they too are soon to die.  Memento mori as such perform a kind of leveling fuction as opposed to making one person distinct.  However, the half-used cosmetic or sundry item is one of the most powerful conveyors of absence, loss, and indeed, the brevity of life. 

They

"Who's 'they'?  Why don't you all get together and be 'they' yourselves?"

---Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (1920)


Indeed. 

Empty as Lettuce

 "Over the weekend, while the Baby sleeps, the Mother and Husband sit together in the Tiny Tim Lounge.  The Husband is restless and makes cafeteria and sundry runs, running errands for everyone.  In his absence, the other parents regale her further with their sagas. Pediatric cancer and chemo stories: the children's amputations, blood poisoning, teeth flaking like shale, the learning delays and disabilities caused by chemo frying the young, budding brain. But strangely optimistic codas are tacked on---endings as stiff and loopy as carpenter's lace, crisp and empty as lettuce, reticulate as a net--ah, words.   'After all that business with the tutor, he's better now, and fitted with new incisors by my wife's cousin's husband, who did dental school in two and half years, if you can believe that. We hope for the best. We take things as they come. Life is hard.'  

'Life's a big problem,' agrees the Mother....Together, the parents huddle all day in the Tiny Tim Lounge--no need to watch Oprah. They leave Oprah in the dust.  Oprah has nothing on them.  They chat matter-of-factly, then fall silent and watch Dune or Star Wars, in which there are bright and shiny robots, whom the Mother now sees not as robots at all but as human beings who have had terrible things happen to them."  

---Lorrie Moore, "People Like That Are The Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk" in Birds of America (1998)



The title of Moore's story references a comment made by a friend of "The Mother " who is surprised by the "bromides" through which the parents in the ward narrate their experiences. I read that after the publication of the story, that some parents at a hospital near to Moore became upset, thinking that her critique was directed at them.

There is something about Moore's piece that seems to hover at the boundaries of fiction and non-fiction and that could lead an unknowing reader--one unfamiliar with Moore-- to misread her piece and its genre.  I suspect though that these parents correctly surmise that Moore's intent is to expose the conventions of tales of illness (the mandate to "stay positive!"  is fairly conventional these days) to reveal the lack of control that underpins such talk, such posturing.  Yet she also shows that the parents' platitudes serve as important guideposts as they navigate through their harrowing journeys.  For the Mother, who has not yet been fully inducted into this world, they can only seem horrifically discordant, part of the nauseous atmosphere of the ward.

Wine of Christ

"We'll see how the surgery and histology go.  Then we'll start with chemo the week following.  A little light chemo:  vincristine and----"

"Vincristine?" interrupts the Mother.  "Wine of Christ?"

"The names are strange, I know.  The other one we use is actinomycin-D. Sometimes called 'dactinomycin.'  People move the D around to the front."

"They move the D around to the front," repeats the Mother.

"Yup!" the Oncologist says.  "I don't know why--they just do!"

"Christ didn't survive his wine," says the Husband. 

"But of course he did," says the Oncologist, and nods toward the Baby, who has now found a cupboard full of hospital linens and bandages and is yanking them all out onto the floor.  "I'll see you guys tomorrow, after the surgery."  And with that, the Oncologist leaves.

"Or rather, Christ was his wine," mumbles the Husband.  Everything he knows about the New Testament, he has gleaned from the sound track of Godspell.  "His blood was the wine. What a great beverage idea."

"A little light chemo.  Don't you like that one?"  says the Mother.  "Eine kleine dactinomycin.  I'd like to see Mozart write that one up for a big wad o'cash."

---Lorrie Moore, "People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk" in Birds of America (1998)

Moore's story originally ran in The New Yorker; while there are many passages that more adequately capture the subject matter, tone, and unique style of this piece, oddly enough, this is one that I recall from my initial reading of the piece in the magazine over a decade ago.  Moore's depiction of the typical Oncologist as part mathematician, part "mad, overcaffienated scientist" is exemplified through this dialogue in which the doctor's superficial and somewhat lighthearted description ("Yup!") of the chemotherapeutic agents stands in stark contrast to the desperation, confusion, and enervation of parents in the pediatric oncology ward.

The story is told through the perspective of "The Mother," a writer whose point of view shifts precariously between the darkly comedic and the abject.  Her eighteen month old son has been diagnosed with Wilms' tumor, a kidney cancer, and the reader follows her on her dizzying journey into the pediatric oncology ward and the experiences of parents who endure the ineffable.  The narrator's stream of consciousness disorients and then reorients the reader, revealing that what seems as surreal as a nightmare is actually a reality.

The next entry will also come from this piece. 

Linear Danger Area

The Black Snake

When the black snake
flashed onto the morning road,
and the truck could not swerve---
death, that is how it happens.

Now he lies looped and useless
as an old bicycle tire.
I stop the car
and carry him into the bushes.

He is as cool and gleaming
as a braided whip, he is as beautiful and quiet
as a dead brother.
I leave him under the leaves

and drive on, thinking
about death: its suddenness,
its terrible weight,
its certain coming. Yet under

reason burns a brighter fire, which the bones
have always preferred.
It is the story of endless fortune.
It says to oblivion: not me!

It is the light at the center of every cell.
It is what sent the snake coiling and flowing forward
happily all spring through the green leaves before
he came to the road.

---Mary Oliver, "The Black Snake"