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The Consoling Power of Art

There are an estimated 42 million unpaid family caregivers in this country (including me), not counting the millions more caring for chronically ill or disabled children, so it’s a shock to learn that the first anthology of poems and short stories about caregiving has just been published in the United States. Not that there aren’t hundreds of helpful nonfiction books, journals, newsletters, websites, blogs, as well as memoirs and novels on the subject, covering every category of patient or need. But a single-volume collection of outstanding short fiction and poetry, reflecting many different takes on this widespread, life-altering experience, has until now been missing, leaving an empty space in our hungry consciousness.  Living in the Land of Limbo: Fiction and Poetry about Family Caregiving (Vanderbilt, 2014), Carol Levine’s selection of fiction and poetry about caregiving by some of the most accomplished writers of our time, is an excellent start to filling it. 

Whereas nonfiction writers are held accountable for their facts and opinions, poets and fiction writers usually are not. This is what happens. Here’s how it feels. Feel it with me. The story or poem may touch or sadden, delight or enrage, inspire or console; it may (or may not) move you to tears or enlarge your understanding; but the common response to nonfiction of assent or challenge doesn’t apply. With literature we enter a different world, a world of empathy, emotion, and humanity in its myriad incarnations, not of policy, theory or judgment. We ponder its meanings, not its claims. And what a relief!

A recipient of a MacArthur “genius” award for her work in AIDS policy and ethics, a pioneer in making hospitals responsive to the needs of family caregivers, herself a longtime caregiver and recently a poet, Levine divides her book into five parts: children of aging parents; husbands and wives; parents and sick children (including adult children); relatives, lovers and friends; and paid caregivers. Having myself been a primary caregiver in categories I, II and III, I have lived the differences among them and recognize the wisdom of Levine’s organization. 

The best anthologies present the breadth, if not depth, of their subject, and this one is no exception. In 35 works (a couple from the 1960s but the rest more recent), covering 281 pages, Living in the Land of Limbo spans a surprising range of contemporary encounters, attitudes and feelings—including some that are controversial—regarding the caregiving experience.  Some works are celebrated, some unknown, but together all, as Levine writes in her introduction, “have much to say about suffering, healing, grief, and the human condition—the essence of caregiving.” Among the most powerful are Lorrie Moore’s heartrending “People Like That Are the Only People Here,” about a baby’s cancer surgery, told in the wry, fierce voice of its mother; Alice Munro’s “The Bear Went over the Mountain” (on which the award-winning 2006 film Away from Her was based), about what happens to a couple after the wife develops Alzheimer’s, enters a nursing home and begins to love another patient; the poem sequence “Atlantis,” by Mark Doty, about his lover’s and his friends’ devastation by AIDS.  Other well-known writers represented here include Ethan Canin, Raymond Carver, Mary Gordon, Gish Jen, W.S. Merwin, Robert Pinsky. 

Several of my favorite stories in the collection are by writers new to me, including Marjorie Kemper, author of the brilliantly funny yet sad “God’s Goodness: A Short Story,” about a paid, immigrant caregiver who develops a closer relationship with her young patient than he has with his parents; and Amy Hanridge, author of “Starter,” about an Apache girl who joined the Marines after 9-11 and returns home with what sounds like PTSD. “Starter” is narrated, uniquely in this anthology, by the patient, whose caregivers (her mother, her therapist) are revealed only obliquely.  

But you will have your own favorites—one of the rewards of anthologies and, indeed, of literature, which we read intimately, one on one, with both heart and mind. 

Ever since I began writing fiction four decades ago, I’ve found that I cannot read fiction for the meaning alone. I am always conscious of the artistry with which the story is written, and I admire most those composed with the greatest skill, no matter the subject.  So although I was often saddened or brought low as I entered the lives of these sick or dying characters and their caregivers, paradoxically my overall response to the book was pleasure, along with admiration and celebration. Pleasure in the rich emotions roused in me (by purging pity and fear, according to Aristotle’s theory of tragedy), admiration for the artistic mastery frequently on display, and celebration of the enlightening and consoling power of art.  My hope is that this anthology and others to come may expand our public understanding of caregiving to include the sorts of insights and feelings that fiction and poetry can best ignite.