The Bloomsbury Review - Jan-Feb, 2000
A child dies, and lives are forever altered. Not just those of the present generation, but into the next generation, and the next. A person’s perspective changes.
I know that as winter days go, this one glistens. I know that the sun ignites flares on the blades of your skates, that the sky is cerulean, that silver dust sprays from the prow of your feet … I know that your figures are flawless, that you leap and land with weightless grace.
But you see that I see almost none of this. In these years since Anna died, your vantage point and mine have become misaligned. My sights have dropped to a hair’s-breadth above the ground. I gauge the ice to be only a fine cold line between exhilaration and peril. I hover over its surface, magnifying figures in its cross-hatched crust, detecting beneath it black water that waits.
The squeals of toddlers shatter my trance. Their parents don’t even wrap them against the gouging wind. I want to tell every mother and father what I learned from Anna: Life teeters on an edge as fine as the blade of a skate. Be dutiful to your children. Keep them warm.
I temper my words. But I’m shunned for even the most delicate warning. The optimism of others terrifies me. Is it I, alone, who knows death is just a cold breath away?
Lillian Moats, in this fictionalized memoir of three generations, first crawls into the thoughts and fears of Christianna Pemberty, her grandmother, whose oldest child died of whooping cough. In the next chapter, into the thoughts and fears of her mother, Lisbet. Then, into her own. She traces with exquisite metaphor and sensitivity the dramatic onslaught of her mental illness. She does it with compassion for the fragile yet unbreakable threads that weave through and around their three lives. She lays no blame.
This is not the typical recovery narrative replete with self-absorbed sordid details, realization, and backhanded accusations. This is a beautiful, brief book in which the reader is not told about the lives or complexes that “funneled” into her own, but rather is shown, subtly, how grief, guilt, and unassuageable fear can find and wind their way, unintentionally, through the psyches and emotions of three generations – maybe more. Its genre, a novel written as if a journal. Its pace, compelling. Its images and descriptions, haunting. Its story, human – the often unspoken but all-to-common tragedy of the death of a child, and its long reach. Does Lillian Moats give us a way to look into the lives of our mothers and grandmothers, or fathers and grandfathers, and solve the mysteries of our lives, our foibles and successes? Yes, I think so. Does she offer us a rare and altered vantage point? Yes, especially if we are willing to step softly, with empathy, into our ancestors’ biographies.
Lillian Moats is a writer (a poet), an artist, and a filmmaker. She is also a brave and generous woman. Legacy of Shadows is well worth the devotion of an afternoon or evening, curled up in your favorite chair or comfortable chaise. Perhaps you have black-and-white family photos, in frilly gold frames or in an album with stiff black paper (and those little white corners). Pull them out and place them nearby.
Virginia Christine Summers
THE BLOOMSBURY REVIEW
January-February 2000
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