Tonight at 8 PM on KPFK 90.7 FM in Southern
California : MONICA WESOLOWSKA. The personal and
ethical challenges of making life and death decisions typically come at the end
- for old people, adults - but in the story told by my guest this week, a
mother is forced to decide when and how to allow her profoundly damaged newborn
to die. With alternately too much to
guide her or, finally, too little, a loving and thoughtful woman – importantly,
a writer - chooses to embrace fully the experience of this decision at every opportunity. My guest this week is Monica Wesolowska, author of
Holding Silvan: A Brief Life. In parts a personal memoir and a layperson’s
guide to the complicated and confusing decision-making that all of us trust
we’ll never have to face, Wesolowska shares with honesty and careful prose the
bitterness, anger, hurt and joy of the short living and long dying of her baby
boy Silvan. There is her alienation from
and then immersion in this process. There
is the theater of weird rules and variables, medical and legal. There is learning the awkward language
required to participate. There is the fear
of losing a marriage, relationships, all in the context of what she calls,
ironically, loving her son to death.
Celebrated with an introduction
by Erica Jong and incredible blurbs from an all-star lineup of writer fans,
long-time writer and teacher Monica
Wesolowska has done, finally, what writers do with the material given them, as
it were, and produced an instant classic on a topic she has turned into art and
insight and elegant, generous, brave prose. Thanks for listening on the radio, online or
as a free download from the KPFK archives.
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