The Constant Reader

The Mercy Papers: A Memoir of Three Weeks is by Robin Romm, whose first book, The Mother Garden was a volume of short stories that had a lot to say about dying mothers. It should be no surprise then that her latest is a brief narrative of the three weeks surrounding her mother’s death from cancer when Romm herself is in her twenties, young to lose a mother. She says in her afterword that when her mother was dying, she “found very few books that spoke of the particulars of loss,” that much “gets said about healing, but what of the violence of the actual event?” I suppose she has a point, although it seems to me that each such slow and painful death, as her mother’s was, is so particular, so freighted with emotions that escape articulation, that writing about them is impossible. Romm’s approach is to describe her anger, frustration and grief in detail in order to convey the loudness and ferocity of the experience. In some ways this is effective, in others it’s irritating. I found myself totally sympathetic to her devastating descriptions of the Hospice nurse with her bag of deadly drugs, the well-meaning friends bringing by inedible casseroles, the funeral home attendants who remove the body, like emissaries from some unspeakable underworld. But I also got impatient with her own retreats into drugged sleep, her lack of empathy for those well-meaning friends. Yes, I understand that she is trying to write in and of the moment, but sometimes it’s too much for the reader—not too much emotion, just too much self. Her thoughtful afterword helps to alleviate that in speaking of her “recovery,” although, as she rightly points out, grief loosens its grip but never let us go. It’s been said that the past is another country, and in the same way grief is another place. Once there, we never quite leave.