Friday, April 08, 2011
Book Talk: The Stuff of Life by Karen Karbo
by Anne Gudger
Anne teaches the Spring Craft class with me,
has thirty years of teaching & writing experience,
and is just a fabulous human!
I helped my daughter pack for college. We crammed bags and boxes with jackets and jeans, pictures of family and friends, her boots and helmet for riding horses. She was moving half way across the country from our home in Portland, Oregon to Fulton, Missouri--to follow her dream and study equestrian science. A big move for an 18-year-old and for her parents too. Two weeks later I helped pack my parents’ dishes and photos and racing trophies and art supplies to move them to assisted living. A huge move for them after living in their home for 37 years.
Both ends of my family were tucked in, at least initially. The untucking would come later. My daughter studied slides under a microscope; my parents studied the meal menu for seniors (How many ways can you cook a potato? Lots.) I looked at my husband and said, “Welcome to the sandwich generation. I’m the peanut butter and you’re the jelly. Squish.”
It’s a landscape we Baby Boomers recognize, caring for our kids and caring for our parents—with us in the middle.
Karen Karbo’s memoir, The Stuff of Life, is some of the best sandwich generation writing I’ve read. Karbo wrangles the heartbreak of caring for her dying dad in Nevada--while shuttling between him and her husband and three children in Portland, Oregon--into a funny, honest page-turner.
Dick Karbo, a kindhearted Clint Eastwood type, living in a triple-wide dubbed “the Palace” in the Nevada desert, is diagnosed with lung cancer. Karen, his only child, steps up to care for him even though she’s frank about not feeling cut out for the job: “I have little patience with the necessary routines of caregiving. I trust doctors about as much as I trust mechanics or the retail associate at Nordstrom who tells me I look fabulous in a pair of $1,200 Calvin Klein Capri pants, and am a barf-o-phone to boot.”
Dick Karbo is a retired industrial designer and card-carrying member of the NRA who is “close-mouthed-to-the-point-of-pathology.” Karen is a Doc Marten wearing freelance writer who juggles motherhood and her writer’s life. She says about her and her dad: “We’re not a well-matched patient-nurse couple.”
Karbo’s uncertainty about nursing her father begs bigger questions about family and loss and wounds. We watch her struggle with how to be present for a parent when so much painful family history’s been bound and sealed and labeled: “Do not touch. Ever.” She loves her dad. As readers, we know this, but love is complicated. Karbo swings between being an adult and a stubborn hurt teenager who sometimes hides out in her dad’s bathroom reading the fake newsprint wallpaper. But in the end self-deprecating and all (She apologizes for being a “blinking, flinching, grief-stricken fool”) she shows up and cares of her dad with warmth and tenderness.
Karbo’s honesty and humor make us love her. We’ll gladly fly between rainy Portland and hot, dry Nevada, we’ll sit on the gold sofa in Dick’s trailer, and we’ll listen with Karen through the thin trailer walls as Dick’s violent coughing brings him closer to death. We watch father and daughter struggle in this new terrain as they see how alike they are and how love and toughness holds them together and holds them apart: “Next to the right to bear arms, my father’s most cherished value is bucking up. He trained me to be a trouper from an earlier age. . . . [As a child] I was so well known for my stoicism that someone wrote on the cinder-block wall that ran behind the parking lot of our apartment building: YOU CAN SLUG KAREN KARBO AND SHE DON’T EVEN CRY!”
If you’re leapfrogging between your kids and parents and feeling like the peanut butter or jelly or pastrami if that’s more your style, I highly recommend The Stuff of Life. Karbo shows us with wit and generous honestly that sometimes you have to laugh or you’ll cry and sometimes, you have to do both.
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