Cancer Courts My Mother
LindaAnn LoSchiavo
Prolific Pule Press LLC, 2025
Ebook, 44 ppg.
ISBN: 978-1-962374-65-1
NOTE: Anyone interested in watching the book trailer for this book can visit this link.
When a loved one is diagnosed with cancer, there are so many ways in which we will change how we see them. We may see them as a fighter, as someone who we could lose tomorrow, or as someone whose life has been turned upside down. For the poet LindaAnn LoSchiavo, she saw her mother’s cancer diagnosis as cancer taking on a physical form and wooing her into a world where she is lost to its enchantment. In the poetry collection, Cancer Courts My Mother, LindaAnn LoSchiavo writes about the very delicate line she walks between being the daughter of an abusive parent who she now must become a caregiver for.
When our parents fall ill, become bedridden or must live with a disease, we, their children, usually feel an obligation to care for them, even if we have a very difficult relationship with them. We still love our parents, in spite of a painful past, and we want to do the right thing in caring for them during their final days. The fact that LoSchiavo took this upon herself after enduring much verbal abuse from her mother over the years is commendable. It shows the ability to look past the complicated relationship and ignore the painful memories to do what is right as a daughter. It also shows her capacity to forgive, in some way, in showing love and care towards an ailing parent.
Even so, cancer itself remains “the elephant in the room,” so to speak. It is the Big Thing that LoSchiavo can see and the Big Thing that is constantly reminding her that it has her mother in its grip. As she writes on page 17: “Cancer, biding his time, taunts me.”
While on one hand, she views her mother’s cancer as an enemy to fight, she also sees it as a formidable enemy that seems almost impossible to beat. In the poem "Bartering with Cancer" on page 20, she writes:
"She can’t describe
Her suffering but seems less combative
Since Cancer came a-courting. He’ll forgive
Coy hesitance. All patients yield to bribes
Of pain relief, embrace the death of light.
Seductive, he's marked her as his captive."
There are also poems in this collection of the aftermath of her mother’s passing, how grief takes hold of her father and the arduous task of not only caring for the plants she left behind but also of going through her personal belongings that are in her closet. These poems serve as a conclusion to the story, the “door pulled shut” not just on one person’s belongings signifying a life lived but also shutting on the author’s telling of these experiences she went through in life with her mother, coping with the cancer diagnosis, being her caregiver and adjusting to the loss. The story comes full circle, leaving the reader with a satisfying ending to this journey.
Cancer Courts My Mother is a collection of heart wrenching and brutally honest poems of one daughter’s experience caring for an ill mother. Written with a fresh perspective and strong imagery, these poems capture a slice of life so difficult to proceed through yet proceed she did, with strength, compassion, and courage.
Five stars
Disclaimer: I received an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.
