“Listen, Paula, I am going to tell you a story, so that when you wake up you will not feel so lost.”
So begins Isabel Allende’s heartbreaking memoir of her daughter Paula’s long dying. Reading this book, Paula: A Memoir, we sit with Allende at the bedside of her comatose daughter as a mesmerizing story unfolds: the childhood story and fatal illness of her beloved child; the story of the Allende family across generations and continents -- from Chile to Lebanon and back to Chile; of Isabel herself -- wife, mother, journalist, human rights advocate, feminist; the story of a culture that lives in the dreams of those who never knew it and tales of those who remember. And the story of a mother's dream that her healthy daughter will take her place once again among her family, interwoven with the bleak reality emerging from the bed her daughter will never leave.
“You have been sleeping for a month now. I don’t know how to reach you; I call and call but your name is lost in the nooks and crannies of this hospital…I plunge into these pages in an irrational attempt to overcome my terror. I think that perhaps if I give form to this devastation I shall be able to help you, and myself, and that the meticulous exercise of writing can be our salvation. On this January 8, 1992, I am writing you, Paula, to bring you back to life.”
In Paula, this master storyteller gives us a template for moving through devastating loss. She writes not what we commonly think of as a story: as a linear progression with a beginning, middle, and end. She writes it as a Diego Rivera mural -- a swirling depiction of a family's life, held together not by linear time but by memories, energetic vibrations, and metaphorical associations. Her story is written in Dreamtime, a passionate recreation of a world that holds everything she remembers, fears, and hopes for: past, present, future, hope, despair, good, evil -- a wholeness beyond fragments, a sum greater than its parts. The framework that holds this collage together takes place over a year, as Isabel refuses and finally surrenders her daughter to death.
Allende wrote this book in the second year of her grieving. Failing to save her daughter, she wrote it to sing herself back into life. In these pages, she tells a story of a love so great that it transcends death. This seems to me to be the reason human beings tell stories: through the archetypal structure of misfortune, struggle, surrender, and transformation, to overcome death -- whatever its form.
The last page of Allende's memoir holds the inevitable uplift in the face of life’s awesome realities that all good stories contain. Her language has moved from images of enclosure, from frozen frightened faces and ever more desperate watching and holding into a new language: slower, spacious, and filled with the freshness of nature, where all is well and all that is eternal is change.
The following passage describes the moment of Paula’s literal death and Isabel’s metaphorical death and rebirth:
"She began to rise, and I with her, clinging to the cloth of her dress. ... Outside, it was already dawn; the sky was streaked with gold and the countryside beneath our feet gleamed, washed by a recent rain. We flew over valleys and hills, and finally descended into a forest of ancient redwoods, where a breeze rustled among the branches and a bold bird defied winter with its solitary song. Paula pointed to the stream; I saw fresh roses lying along its banks and a white power of calcined bones on the bottom, and I heard the music of thousands of voices whispering among the trees...."
Story naturally transforms itself, like nature, of which it is the human voice. When everything in us wants to stand mute with suffering, if we can give expression to our experience, if we can write, tell, dance, draw, or sing that story, it will take on its own voice and teach us how to live again.
(The above is a fragment from my book, A Write of Passage, in progress, due for publication in late 2013 or early 2014.) Citation: Isabel Allende, Paula: A Memoir, translated from the Spanish by Margaret Sayers Peden (New York: Harper Perennial, 2nd edition, 2008.)
My wish for you is peaceful learning from nature's lessons, as we in the north head into the ripening of summer, and you in the south gather to share good food and great stories.
Kindest regards,
Juliet
www.julietbruce.com