Words, art, body and memory: readings from a writer

This essay considers the consequences of childhood experiences with family illness on future adult sensibilities. Novelist and memoirist Mary Gordon describes her father's early death from heart disease and her childhood responsibilities toward her mother who was chronically ill with polio. She examines the relations between the ill body and the rituals and teachings of Catholicism and, by implication, all religious imagings of the body. By detailing her current caregiving responsibilities toward her mother, who is now homebound with Alzheimer disease, she scrutinizes the responses of the healthy toward the ill. She cites passages from her own novels--The Other Side, The Shadow Man, and Spending--in which characters' bodies fail and sicken. By examining these retrospective and prospective experiences with other people's ailments, Gordon exhorts medical students and doctors to tend to the bodies in their care with skill, with vision, and with words. She joins fellow writer Joseph Conrad in his task: "by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel; it is, before all, to make you see."