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    Blue Peninsula: Essential Words for a Life of Loss and Change
    Blue Peninsula: Essential Words for a Life of Loss and Change
    Blue Peninsula: Essential Words for a Life of Loss and Change
    Ebook200 pages1 hour

    Blue Peninsula: Essential Words for a Life of Loss and Change

    By Madge McKeithen

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    About this ebook

    "My son's illness is eight years old and has no name. It started when he was fourteen. He is now twenty-two. It is taking away his ability to walk and to reason. It is getting worse, some years more rapidly than others."

    These words begin the first section of Blue Peninsula, a narrative of a son's degenerative illness in thirty-three parts focused around poems that have provided companionship and sustenance to the author. When multiple diagnostic avenues delivered no explanation for the worsening disabilities of her older son, Ike, Madge McKeithen "became a poetry addict--collecting, consuming, ripping poems out of magazines, buying slender volumes that would fit in my pocket or pocketbook, stashing them in loose-leaf notebooks, on shelves, stacking them on the floor. In the midst of all this grief, I had fallen in love. With words. Poems, especially. And just in time."

    McKeithen draws on a wonderfully wide ranging group of of poets and lyricists--including Emily Dickinson, the Rolling Stones, Paul Celan, Bruce Springsteen, Marie Howe, Walt Whitman, and many others--to illuminate, comfort, and help to express her sorrow. Some chapters are reflections on friendships and family relationships in the context of a chronic and worsening illness. Some consider making peace with what life has dealt, and others value intentionally reworking it.

    Not written to suggest easy solace, this powerful work aims to keep company, as would any individual whose loved one is on a course in which the only way out is through.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateApr 4, 2006
    ISBN9781429952323
    Blue Peninsula: Essential Words for a Life of Loss and Change
    Author

    Madge McKeithen

    Madge McKeithen was born in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and attended the College of William and Mary and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. She has been a teacher, and a researcher and editor for a U.S. congressman and the World Bank. She lives in New York City. Blue Peninsula is her first book.

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      Book preview

      Blue Peninsula - Madge McKeithen

      Blue Peninsula

      A Coming to Terms

      ______________

      A MATHEMATICS OF BREATHING

      I

      Think of any of several arched

      colonnades to a cathedral,

      how the arches

      like fountains, say,

      or certain limits in calculus,

      when put to the graph-paper’s cross-trees,

      never quite meet any promised heaven,

      instead at their vaulted heights

      falling down to the abruptly ending

      base of the next column,

      smaller, the one smaller

      past that, at last

      dying, what is

      called perspective.

      This is the way buildings do it.

      II

      You have seen them, surely, busy paring

      the world down to what it is mostly,

      proverb: so many birds in a bush.

      Suddenly they take off, and at first

      it seems your particular hedge itself

      has sighed deeply,

      that the birds are what come,

      though of course it is just the birds

      leaving one space for others.

      After they’ve gone, put your ear to the bush,

      listen. There are three sides: the leaves’

      releasing of something, your ear where it

      finds it, and the air in between, to say

      equals. There is maybe a fourth side,

      not breathing.

      III

      In my version of the Thousand and One Nights,

      there are only a thousand,

      Scheherazade herself is the last one,

      for the moment held back,

      for a moment all the odds hang even.

      The stories she tells she tells mostly

      to win another night of watching the prince

      drift into a deep sleeping beside her,

      the chance to touch one more time

      his limbs, going,

      gone soft already with dreaming.

      When she tells her own story,

      Breathe in,

      breathe out

      is how it starts.

      —CARL PHILLIPS

      My son’s illness is eight years old and has no name. It started when he was fourteen. He is now twenty-two. It is taking away his ability to walk and to reason. It is getting worse, some years more rapidly than others. Doctors continue to look for a name to call it. Until they find one, it is known to us by the names of its symptoms—progressive spastic paraparesis, Bence-Jones proteinuria, subcortical dementia—and intimately by its subtle violence, the anonymous thief ravaging our dreams and twisting our son’s life.

      falling down to the abruptly ending

      base of the next column,

      smaller, the one smaller

      past that . . .

      He had been healthy and characteristically happy, our firstborn. Isaac, we had named him, the one who laughs; he chose to be called Ike when he became a teenager. During the second half of 1997, as he approached his fifteenth birthday, his walk became stiff-legged, progressively awkward, lurching. The pediatrician referred us to an orthopedist and he to a neurologist. November 13, 1997, a Thursday afternoon, the brilliant pediatric neurologist who would pursue the first battery of tests examined Ike and said, almost to himself, There is definitely something wrong here. We had begun the leap across the divide from before and normal. We had no idea that eight years later we would still be suspended, waiting for an after, a diagnosis, a place to

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