Transformation into patient
The words tremble on the pages of Maja Lucas’ novel, Katrines hånd (‘Katrine’s Hand’), which registers a life being counted down and out
By May Schack
Katrine is going to be 59, when she sends out invitations to her birthday. She has just been diagnosed with a tumour on the brain. She signs the invitations ‘Mum’, even though strictly speaking she is only biological mother to two people in the large blended family. The others are step-children, children-in-law, grand-children. The mother role, is that the last thing left once you have been sentenced to be terminally ill as a woman? Scarcely. The last role is called ‘patient’, and it resembled a little child’s.
Understated, in carefully controlled prose that never says too much, Maja Lucas allows her few, well-chosen words to stand and tremble on the page. The person registering the course of Katrine’s illness and the family’s reactions is the first person narrator, the step-daughter Sarah. The book is composed in three parts built around diagnosis and treatment, at the hospice, brief flowering and death. The symbol that brings it all together is Katrine’s hand. Now Katrine is someone whose hand has to be held, has to be physically supported so that she can walk, she has to be fed and looked after, and she herself says: ‘Isn’t it strange to have to look after me, as though I were a child?’
The portrayal shows how the roles have been reversed. Sarah notes: ‘My father had promised that he would not leave her, even though she lost all her hair, but even at that point she had changed category from being a woman to being a patient.’ To change category is to lose part of yourself, as is so amply demonstrated in this little novel.
For Katrine gradually loses her personality; she moves from person to role. Treatment with corticosteroids makes her psychotic for a time. When they cut down on them, she becomes more herself. But the doctor has to tell the family that the tumour has destroyed a quantity of brain tissue, even though Katrine can suddenly walk again. One question lies like a minefield under the surface of the narrative: How much quality of life is left for a person who, once so full of intellectual life and humour, is now so starkly reduced? We can sense a desire for the process soon to be over, so that the family can get out of this limbo and continue with their life as something other than next-of-kin. The desire is entirely understandable and legitimate. There is much about death that we do not dare express in our culture and which is captured here.
To handle such a difficult subject requires utterly convincing language. Maja Lucas, who has formerly written fine lyrical prose, raises her account way above the level of the ordinary patient narrative. The novel’s strength lies in the phenomenological registration of the concrete details of the course of the illness set in everyday and at times comic situations that are tragic and shocking. This account of living with death through eight long months is beautifully accomplished in all its sobriety and honesty.
Translated by John Mason |
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Dansk version |
