Excerpts from a Family Medical Dictionary

How to write about the death of your mother? That is the burden Rebecca Brown admirably shoulders in this short and valuable memoir. Each pithy chapter is titled after a medical term, an ever serious litany that charts the downward spiral of a life.

Figure 1.

Rebecca Brown

Granta, £10, pp 108 ISBN 1 86207 642 1

Rating: ★★★★

Brown's mother was an active soul who rarely complained, a keen driver based in New Mexico who travelled across the vast spaces of American desert to visit her beloved family on the West Coast. One time she isn't up to it, she feels tired—“her doctor had told her she needed rest.” When she gets to the right team it turns out that she has metastatic gastric carcinoma: “Your mother is profoundly anemic,” this new doctor said. Then he repeated, “profoundly.”

Neither panegyric nor horror-show freak out, Brown's reportage of the subsequent medical events is never judgmental, the bad news given straight. Here she is after meeting the surgeon: “He said he couldn't be certain until they got the biopsy back, but `the tumor was probably cancerous.' Then I was doing this thing with the words in my head. I said to myself, He didn't say she had cancer, he only said the tumor was probably cancerous and tumors can be taken out, I thought at exactly the same time. I was making all these fine, picky distinctions in my head.”

Brown's eye on her own and others' reactions are unflinching: “When we came in (to the waiting room) everyone stared at her. The sick people looked healthy compared to her. They looked fantastic. I don't know if she knew how she looked. She smiled and some people tried to smile back, but most people looked away.”

This is a dry eyed and balanced account written after the acute pain has subsided only to leave the blunt ache of loss. Brown's is a lean, laconic story where every word is squeezed out like a drip from a burette. Like Hemingway, like Carver, a simple prose style appears facile but is only achieved after much rewriting, much agonising. Brown's lapidary work is in this tradition and is complimentary to the difficult material.

It has been said with regards to bereavement that there is no language but the cry. Brown finds those elusive words. Essential reading for those involved in palliative care, and that's all of us.