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The Way They Change Things
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20037 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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12 / 1992 |
1,888 Words |
| Author
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Judith Bell
Judith Bell is an art historian and novelist based in
Arlington, Virginia. |
I WILL SING LIFE
Voices from the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp
Larry Berger, Dahlia Lithwick, and Seven Campers
Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1992
207 pp., $22.95
A friend of mine whose teenage sons had begun to get the better of her recently began volunteering as an aide in a children's hospice. "I needed," she said simply, "to gain some perspective." The experience has been one she mostly holds to herself. "We lost one today," she may quietly say when the unstoppable loss that is the nature of such work spills over into her regular life. Recently, at such a moment, one of the sons in question loped through the room, doing his best to ignore the two middle-aged women occupying his sphere. My friend's eyes locked on her near-grown child with a fierce possessiveness that found me suddenly studying the carpet, an uncomfortable witness to this private moment of compressed parental emotion.
I am not as brave as my friend, who weekly enters a world where there are only endings. I live, as most of us do, in one where death is hidden away, removed, reduced to an abstraction doled out in measured sound bites on the eleven o'clock news. So, looking to be touched in my own small way, I chose instead to read about children confronting life-threatening diseases.
"Inspiration/Medicine" reads the top of the jacket cover of I Will Sing Life: Voices from the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp. Inspiration, yes; I found plenty of it. What else could you feel meeting seven children, ages seven to seventeen, who in coming so close to death have become more alive, condensing the passion, curiosity, and understanding of a lifetime into their few years? Medicine? That too, though not in the sense that I'm sure the book's publisher had in mind. "Ah, you taste so bitter and so sweet, I could drink a case of you and I would still be on my feet," goes the refrain of an old Joni Mitchell song. There is a similar bittersweet tonic here for the reader. Sharing in these campers' unadulterated joy in living, you may also, as I did, feel some shame thinking of the small complaints that balloon large in your own existence. And if you have small children, you may find yourself putting aside the book to tiptoe into their room, where you draw the covers protectively over your marvelous good fortune and bend to drink in the poignant perfume of perfect health.
"In the midst of life we are in death" reads the "Burial of the
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