Summary Of Embalming Mom By Janet Wally

We are stuck in a stable distance from each other, magnets connected by the stream of my words. I start my story in the middle and move in both directions. I tell her unimportant things, memories of little events that happened to me, clothes Mom wears and Dad’s funny mailman adventures. I tell her Aunt Ida’s favorite programs and I tell her about Father Tom and the yellow raft. I tell her, yes, Seattle, but the reservation too, and Mom somewhere with a man named Dayton and all her pills from Charlene. I tell her I wanted to trade places with Ellen. I tell her about my lifetime membership and I tell her about mom just walking off and leaving….I don’t hang for her to answer anymore. There’s a weight off me. I said it all out loud and the world didn’t come to an end. (Dorris 105-106)

In the short story, “A Christmas Memory”, by Truman Capote, a boy relives his most memorable Christmas with his older cousin. During his story the old woman and him both develop strong developments. The use of character to character interaction and visual imagery is key to the suggested theme that the power of memory influences people to relive their lives.

After the death of her mother the narrator is left to care for the rest of her family: her father and two brothers. The narrator encounters her own, personal reactions to her mother’s passing. “I saw scars bubbling beneath the surface: rippled flesh, mother to daughter,” (Orton 17). The narrator describes vividly the scarring occurring in her flesh, and the inclusion of the phrase, “mother to daughter” signifies that her mother passes

In the first example of imagery, Jeannette Walls describes her mother to the readers in great detail. “Her long hair was streaked with gray, tangled and matted, and her eyes had sunk deep

A memoir of a childhood lost to multiple mysteries illnesses , Julie Gregory tells us about the unseen abuse she endured as a young child and how it affected her into her adult years. Now as an adult Julie reminisces on her dysfunctional family, from her schizophrenic father to her low key mentally ill mother. From a young age Julie Gregory was continually tested for a sickness that was non existent, made up in the mind of her mother she had “suffered” from many different illnesses including a heart condition. Her childhood in Ohio consisted of doctor visits, x-rays, medication, and operations all of which were unneeded. Only when Julie was an adult did she realize that the person who was sick was not her but instead her mother. Munchausen

The novel contains an abundant of physical, verbal, and emotional aspects regarding Tan and her mother through the excerpt to set the tone. The excerpt, from Tan’s point of view, begins immediately with Tan’s mother switching off the television and forcing Tan to stand up and pulling against her will towards the piano room. As this confrontation progresses, the pair get into a fierce argument. This is expressed when Tan and her mother were struggling with each other and Tan screams, ”you want me to be something I'm not!”....”I wish I were dead! Like them!”(Tan 141-142). Once Tan admits how she feels, the argument quickly dissolves. Tan’s recollections could be taken as seriously, dark , intense or fearful from all the rapid changes in Tan and her mother’s emotions.

Auden’s mother began as an unaccepting woman, who couldn’t accept people's decisions unless it was an action or belief in which she shared the same opinion on or would also choose to act upon the action as well. Plus if you thought people change, she would have issues with you. The morning of her graduation Auden walked into the kitchen accompanying her tall black haired mom. With the smell of freshly brewed coffee dancing to the rhythm of anticipation awaiting her graduation ceremony in which was soon to be happening. The phone suddenly rang as she carefully gathered the

The once lively streets of Pennsylvania couldn’t hear shoes clicking against a creaky wooden staircase. The only noise that could be heard in this abandoned ghost town was the sound of a long dress sweeping against the floors of a once prosperous journalist’s home. Only the locked up homes would listen to the drawn out sigh from Mother Smith. But the only person who could hear her thoughts was herself.

The quote above displays individual desire love and attention to fulfill their loneliness. It reminds me of Russell Banks’ short story, “My Mother’s Memoirs, My Father’s Lie, and Other True Stories.” Bank’s short story appears loneliness of mankind even in a family relationship. The reason why his fiction is well-known is that he connects his personal stories to his fiction so it seems more vivid and realistic compared to other ordinary author’s story. Russell Banks was conceived on March 28, 1940 in Newton, Massachusetts and brought up in the residential area of Barnstead, New Hampshire, the child of Earl and Florence Banks. He got accepted to Colgate University,

“We’re moving to North Carolina!” Exclaimed my father with particularly excited face. My heart dropped. I thought to myself “Was I really going to be ripped away from everything I’ve ever known?” I felt a cocktail of sadness and anxiety swirling in my gut as I ran out the door onto the porch in an indignant manor. It was cold outside yet it didn’t even seem to register to me because of the disbelief that I was trying to process in my mind. The moonlight struck the lake in front of the house and reflected off of the surface creating an eerie glare, and in the distance you could hear the wildlife creating a symphony of sound.

The second mode, metamemory, is perhaps best illustrated by Albertina Carri’s Los rubios (2003). Metamemory discourse, through generational and aesthetic-methodological distancing, seeks to reveal memory’s limits, both individual and collective. In this mode, a lack of information about the hero figure’s death eclipses love bonds; it introduces an aesthetic and narrative distance that flattens affect. In Carri’s experience, when so little is known, when life is in such turmoil, it is difficult to speak from a place of emotion. Los rubios, therefore, sublimates affect, casting it as a void, and chooses to focus instead on illustrating memory’s limits and its decidedly performative and fictional qualities.

The stench of rotten cheese and burnt bread wreaked from under my pillow. Saved from the previous night, I had breakfast awaiting to be scarfed down. Mother always said it was better than nothing, but then again, she always sat by the window. The light was drained from her face that night. It seemed like all the life was sucked out of her when we were seperated from father. It seemed as if she had fallen under a spell, going along with those soldiers orders, listening to that

I walked into the back door of a stone house. Accompanied by my parents and younger sibling. I did not recognize my surroundings, the people, nor recall a reason for my presence. The smell of fresh mud and ashes ran up my nose, an unfamiliar environment. My mother led the way, within each step her footsteps hit the ceramic floor with more frequency. She confidently walked toward the kitchen. My mother’s expression conveyed slight excitement however, I could see her eyes begin to twinkle with tears and turn a rose red color. I pulled on the hem of her cardinal colored shirt.

In the poems, the author’s explore sacrifice of being a mother and putting their children before themselves. In Claude McKay’s “My Mother”, the author’s mother insisted her son go to work although she was sick. In the poem he states, “And, smiling sadly in the old sweet way, she pointed to the nail where hung my cap. Her eyes said: I shall last another day.” His mother was sick and never knew when her day would come, but instead of her making her son stay with her and miss out on a day’s work she made him go. The world stops for no one, and during this time period people were fleeing north and seeking employment. So, him is missing that one day of work he could have been fired and replaced and his mother knew that. Without a job, he would

If the parent suddenly goes away, the child will feel a sense of loss and desperation to find out where the person they looked up to went. In “My Mother’s Closet”, because of the Mother’s absence, the child felt a sense of anguish, feeling that they had to find where their mother had gone;like it was their duty. “I searched your handbags, examined then for signs, evidence—“(line 3, stanza 3). This child is at a loss to what happened to their other parent. They are looking at the tiniest, most insignificant details, just to try and find their mother. “Your shoes were their own country, the heels, satins,the inexplicable mud — I scraped them with small fingernails, marveling at the gorgeous debris, wishing I had a microscope”(stanza 2). Mud is such an irrelevant detail, yet to this child it’s a gold mine of it will help find their mother. These quotes prove to point that, because of the Mother’s action to disappear, (whether it being her fault or not) she has affected her child. As a result, this child may never fully self-identify themselves, because they may have never gotten that closure of knowing what happened to their missing parent. Therefore, whether a parent is present or absent in a child’s life, they will help to shape who the child becomes with