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Mother
Lode: Stories of Home Life and Home Death
by Susan Addison. University
of Queensland Press, 2001.
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When all's
said and done, he left us. Charlie left us, his family
and friends; we didn't lose him. How could we?
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A
sad and profoundly moving book, although ultimately uplifting,
Mother Lode: Stories of Home Life and Home Death
relates through a series of stories and woodcut prints,
one family's real life struggle to come to terms with
their teenage son's death from cancer.
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Narrated
by the mother who cannot save her child, Susan Addison's
writing is infused with both a warm humanity as well as
her deep sadness. Beginning with Charlie's diagnosis and
the stories she told him 'to sustain them both though
his long illness', the latter part of this book sensitively
relates how the remaining three family members come to
terms with his death.
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Addison
begins by narrating her own feelings of instability when
her beloved son is diagnosed with cancer just as he was
about to start university in 1994. The deaths of her parents
and parents-in-law, while understandably upsetting, were
within the author's 'conception of the natural order of
things', as they were people of an older generation. Her
son's illness, however, divided the whole history of their
family life into 'Before Tumour' and 'After Tumour'. When
her son died at home in September 1995 this feeling of
instability increased, 'far from being like a stable table,
our symmetrical family of four had had one leg knocked
out from under it'.
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