Notice: Function _load_textdomain_just_in_time was called incorrectly. Translation loading for the responsive-lightbox domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /home/sundre5/ducts.sundresspublications.com/content/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6114

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/sundre5/ducts.sundresspublications.com/content/wp-includes/functions.php:6114) in /home/sundre5/ducts.sundresspublications.com/content/wp-includes/feed-rss2-comments.php on line 8
http://ducts.sundresspublications.com/content/essays/freak-of-nature/ The Webzine of Personal Stories Tue, 16 Jul 2013 20:34:08 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.7.5 http://ducts.sundresspublications.com/content/essays/freak-of-nature/comment-page-1/#comment-2200 Tue, 16 Jul 2013 20:34:08 +0000 http://www.ducts.org/content/?p=2798#comment-2200 Walter Cummins has written a wonderful memoir here, a real tragicomedy, both dark and funny from the double-edged sword of irony.
The genre is something new in the literature of death, according to an essay by Meghan O’Rourke (“Deadlines,” New York Times Book Review 7/7/13): “Writers are recording their own deaths as they happen.” She cites such recent examples as John Updike and Christopher Hitchens, victims of a “slow, medicalized end, portrayed [by them] in documentary detail.” Cummins certainly is almost clinically concrete in describing his cystectomy and urostomy, paying attention as if he were vividly alive, not near death from bladder cancer. This is, O’Rourke says, “a classically ironic state.”
But unlike Updike and Hitchens, Cummins really is still alive. After much discomfort and downright pain, he has come through his ordeal, a “freak of nature” with stoma and plastic bag instead of a bladder. So is he cured? Well sort of, and there’s the greatest irony of all: He went through all this “for a slightly greater probability of five-year survival.” Nothing is certain except – well, you know.

]]>