Foreword to Front Matter: Recovery

Foreword to Front Matter:Recovery Michael Blackie We all know something about recovery. The return of a lost object, like health or dignity, maybe a cherished memento, or a talisman from another time. It is a narrative driven experience, propelled by expectation, a story we tell to make sense of what can be recovered or to put into perspective that which remains beyond reach. In either case, getting there or not is the story. In this time of Covid, many of us can now describe recovering from an infection, an idea that seemed frighteningly uncertain before vaccines became available. And for too many, recovery doesn't come, like for my dear mentor Carol Donley, who died this past April from complications of Covid, or for those enduring symptoms of long Covid, like the author whose relapse prevented her from completing her contribution to this issue's Front Matter. There are even grimmer realities, like when a search-and-rescue mission becomes a recovery operation. Yes, we all know something about recovery and we're drawn to stories about someone, even a stranger, who has triumphed over illness, adversity, or injustice. The six contributions that follow tell stories about recovery or challenge the narrative conventions upon which they are told. Here is mine. Each spring I teach a session on close reading to nursing students in a seminar on hospice care. The literary text I assign is Sherman Alexie's "Blankets," told by a narrator who is the son of an elderly Indian man who has just undergone a surgical amputation of his right foot and several toes from his left, the consequences of alcoholism and diabetes.1 Most of the story takes place in what the son calls a "recovery hallway" in a busy urban hospital in Washington state (44). The story's rich descriptions and metaphors reward close reading, but it's an odd story for a class on hospice care because no one in it dies or enters hospice. The focus is, rather, on becoming a caregiver. The son's growing awareness of what his father's recovery will demand [End Page 5] from him as his caretaker illuminates the dynamics of informal care- giving for these future nurses. The recovery ahead promises to be daunting. The son knows his father will continue to drink once he is discharged, that he will likely put his disfigurement to work in the local bar, winning bets doing wheelies in his new wheelchair. As the son begins to see traditional roles reversing, with the adult child now caring for the ill parent (the "circle of life" he calls "poetic bullshit"), students inevitably begin sharing their own experiences with caregiving (47). They will differ in the details, but where we get to is mostly the same: how the idea of recovery can become oppressive when it seems always out of reach, when one realizes recovery's narrative expectations will go unmet. It is at this point in the discussion when I draw students back to the text, back to the "recovery hallway" specifically, to highlight its liminality and ask them to consider how much caregiving takes place in such spaces. The narrator's father, whose position in the hallway affords him "no privacy, not even a thin curtain," so that "his decades of poor health and worse decisions [are] illuminated" (45), is not alone. The narrator is there beside him, equally exposed to the judgment of others who "believed there was a point when doctors should stop rescuing people from their own self-destructive impulses" (46). He admits to us, his readers, that he "couldn't disagree" with such judgments, but insists that he should also be able to "ask for the most basic of comforts" for his father despite his addiction and poor health (46). That exposure is experienced and shared by anyone whose illness—whose fall from health, or infirmity, or loss of independence—carries a tinge of guilt or shame. Knowing addiction intimately, how it pulls a family together and apart in equal measure, means I know something about judgment—and how it slyly links up with hope. How intoxicatingly imperious hope can be in a recovery story; how...