Literature and Medicine II

16 As illustrated in the previous section, narrativization does not only create a coherent pattern, it also creates meaning, and this attempt to “extract a configuration from a succession” (Ricoeur 278) is also part of Lund’s narrative. Lund does not only describe her son’s battle, she also uses his fight to discuss existential questions of life, death, and living, and her son increasingly becomes a symbol of a life lived to the fullest in spite of adversity and pain. This image is established right at the beginning of the narration, only a few weeks after Eric’s initial diagnosis. Both angry and heartbroken when her son stubbornly insists on going to a football game on a freezing cold and wet day “with antibiotic pills in one pocket of his black loden coat and leukemia pills in the other” (20), Lund suddenly realizes that Eric needs to live now, no matter the risk, if he wants to live at all: “I watched [Eric leave], and I was changed. In that moment I began to understand. Now might be all he would ever have. He had to life his life. And living meant running risks. [...] There was no longer any ‘sure.’ I accepted the terrible precariousness of his life from that moment. I let go and said, ‘Eric—live!” (21). Lund accepts at this point that, despite his condition, Eric is no longer a boy but a young man, who wants and needs to live his life independently and without restrictions. He refuses to accept his illness as a limitation and lives with and in spite of it.

17 This incredible will to live is an important theme of the narrative and helps Lund to reevaluate her son’s fate. Eric might have died young, but his life was full and complete nevertheless. Reflecting on her son’s early death, Lund writes: [Eric] saw the marvelous opportunities in minutes. One whole good day was a feast. [...] In spite of the fact that much of his youth had been spent fighting to live, the world was beautiful with possibility for Eric. And now I find it is more so for me. Eric’s death is not the end of joy. It’s somehow a chance for another start. I hear his favorite Chicago record still playing. “The Beginning.” (334) Eric’s life, these lines insist, was neither incomplete nor in vain. His death is indeed a beginning to Lund—she even uses imagery of labor and giving birth to describe his last hours (cf. 312, 323)—and she links this idea not only to her own life but also to that of others by embedding Eric’s individual fight within the larger context of the fight against cancer. Eric may have lost his battle, but his fight, the last sentence of Lund’s account assures us, helped others to win theirs: “And the day would surely come when Peter [a new leukemia patient on Eric’s former ward]—or someone—was going to walk out there cured, and not have to go back. We might not be around to see it. But we were connected just the same. And Eric would be part of that victory” (335).[1]The idea that Eric helped others to survive is further developed in the additional afterword, which Lund added to her narrative in 1989. After describing the increasingly successful treatment of leukemia in the 1970s and 80s, Lund refers to a conversation with one of Eric’s oncologists, Dr. Victor Grann, to link Eric to that success story: “‘Eric, and the young patients of his generation, made a tremendous contribution,’ Victor assured me. ‘We were able to tap them for all sorts of information, study our successes or failures, and make careful judgments about what to try next time’” (340).These lines clearly show that Lund does not only describe her son’s life, she interprets it—she extracts a configuration from a succession of events, to use Ricoeur’s terminology once more—and thereby provides her experiences and Eric’s fate with meaning and a sense of direction.

18 Lund’s narrative, however, does not only reestablish coherence, it is also a story about the slow and hesitant redefinition of a mother’s self. One of the major themes of Lund’s account is Eric’s growing independence. In spite of his sickness, Eric increasingly leaves his mother’s care. Only weeks after his initial diagnosis, for instance, he tells his mother not to cook for him any longer because he will be “out a lot” (22). He also asks her not to do his laundry or to clean his room, and he does not want her to call his doctor anymore: “It’s my problem. [...] I’ll let you know if there is anything you need to know” (22). A few weeks later, during his second round of Chemo, Eric insists on attending a few classes at one of the nearby colleges, and, during one of his later remissions, he moves out to study at the University of Connecticut as planned and is even picked for the University’s soccer team. A few months before his death, finally, Eric starts dating a young nurse named MaryLou, and the two of them develop a surprisingly mature relationship, which ends with Eric’s death in his girlfriend’s arms.

19 Lund insists that Eric himself is the driving force behind his growing wish for independence, but she repeatedly stresses her willingness to let him go and her approval of his choice as well. The theme here, accordingly, is not only Eric’s development but also that of his mother—Lund slowly leaves her role as a mother behind and finally even allows Eric’s girlfriend to take over the role of Eric’s most intimate partner when she leaves it to MaryLou to hold and embrace Eric in the moment of his death, even though his parents are present as well.

20 One might object here that Lund simply describes the things as she remembers them, but her choice to focus on Eric’s growing independence and her willingness to let him go—rather than on his medical condition or moments of dependence and intimacy between mother and son—implies a redefinition of Lund’s role as a mother as well. Back when her son was still alive, Lund was forced to let him go, both because Eric insisted on his independence and because cancer finally claimed his life. After his death, however, when she focuses on her own development and her approval of Eric’s decision, Lund not only retrospectively endorses Eric’s decision, but also redefines and rewrites her own role in Eric’s life; in her narrative, she lets him go and is once more in charge of both her narrative and her life.