\nby Alice Munro
\nfrom\u00a0Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n
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Eileen is aimless and irresponsible, she comes out of the same part of the world accidents come from.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n “Memorial” follows the thoughts of this Eileen while she’s staying with June, her sister who has attempted to organize her life and live with a strong sense of control. Indeed, when the story begins, Eileen is waking up in bed when June comes in to serve her coffee and toast in bed. Eileen tries to be gracious while telling June that\u00a0she<\/em> should be serving\u00a0June<\/em>, as that’s the primary reason for her visit. It doesn’t take long before we learn, almost as an aside, why June has come to a home she finds so solicitous and, therefore, uncomfortable. She says of June, “Bereavement had heightened her color, if anything.”<\/p>\n An accident has happened: June’s seventeen-year-old son, Douglas, has died in a car wreck. Eileen has come to do what she can to help, but what she finds makes her feel irrelevant — and worse, it makes her feel deeply disturbed.<\/p>\n She found that she disliked even the tone of June’s voice on the telephone.\u00a0Good morning, hi! Hi, it’s June!<\/em> Such a cheerful buoyant matter-of-fact voice, and wasn’t there in this very buoyancy some challenge, some lively insistence on control? Could it be said that June wished for admiration? Well, why not? If it will help. If anything will help.<\/span><\/p>\n Nevertheless Eileen disliked this tone, she was discouraged by it.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Here she finds her sister, and by extension her sister’s husband Ewart, slaves to order in a world that is chaotic. She finds a sickness. Of course, though she may be right about her sister, Eileen can’t help but feel some degree of judgment and resentment. She’s ostensibly there to help, and yet she’s allowing it to become personal:<\/p>\n Occasions were made the most of.<\/span><\/p>\n Was this another occasion?<\/span><\/p>\n [. . . .]<\/span><\/p>\n An occasion, why not? An occasion to display, to air, to test those values that we live by.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Whether or not June is playing a kind of game, or using the death of her son to posture, Eileen is going to look at it that way, and she is going to respond in kind:<\/p>\n I have not worked through anything<\/em>, Eileen thought. And further:\u00a0I do not believe things are there to be worked through.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n People die; they suffer, they die. Their mother had died of ordinary pneumonia, after all that craziness. Illness and accidents. They ought to be respected, not explained. Words are all shameful. They ought to crumble in shame.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n The relationship between June and Eileen, as conveyed by the unreliable, embittered, Eileen, was fascinating to me and leads to a devastating, if strangely hopeful, resolution.<\/p>\n Betsy<\/strong><\/p>\n [fusion_dropcap boxed=”no” boxed_radius=”” class=”” id=”” color=”#003366″]\u201cM[\/fusion_dropcap]emorial\u201d is to me a great story.<\/p>\n Douglas, seventeen, has died in an accident. Eileen, his aunt, arrives in Vancouver to offer her sister June comfort, but it is an uncomfortable time.Eileen and June had been close as children, but as adults, June\u2019s wealth, and her predilection for orderliness and accomplishment and position separate the sisters. June has had a family of seven; two of them adopted Indian girls, something that Eileen finds a bit of a performance. Now June\u2019s response to death is also a performance.<\/p>\n Eileen saw that she had been na\u00efve to have expected a change. She thought June\u2019s body might have loosened, in her grief, that her voice might have grown uncertain, or been silenced.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Eileen notices the way wealth has distorted June, the way \u201cthere was a morality of buying and use, a morality of consumerism,\u201d everything bought for its message, the way people now buy cars as totems.\u00a0Eileen is the divorced mother of one daughter, and she \u201chad never had any money, so she was able to be spendthrift, slipshod, content.\u201d\u00a0Eileen is uncomfortable with June, uncomfortable in the house and uncomfortable with the Unitarian Church Memorial Service, at which someone read from The Prophet<\/em>.\u00a0This provokes Eileen. \u201cSuch fraud, she thought, such insolence.\u201d<\/p>\n Grief will out, but in each of\u00a0 the sisters it takes a very different course. June is the mistress of a perfectly ordered life.\u00a0Wealth has allowed her to indulge in an appetite for control.\u00a0It is almost as if June wishes to be \u201cadmired\u201d for the controlled manner in which she is managing the disorder of her son\u2019s death and the disorder of her emotions. Many people gather at June\u2019s house after the service, a gathering which one of the teenagers calls a \u201cmemorial party,\u201d and the teens smoke weed. A guest at the house says of June that she has been \u201cmagnificent.\u201d<\/p>\n There is throughout the story the sense of people searching for the means to deal with death — now that we don\u2019t believe, now that we must manufacture meaning.<\/p>\n Eileen gets very drunk and retreats to her room early, only to get up later for a glass of water after all the guests are gone and June had gone to bed.<\/p>\n Ewart, the quiet, awkward source of all the money, is up as well. Earlier, he had shown Eileen his Japanese garden, as if displaying his garden to her was a proper for the \u201coccasion,\u201d and in a way it is, since Douglas had just this past week had helped his father install another shrub.<\/p>\n That night, in the kitchen, Eileen allows Ewart to embrace her, allows the embrace to become actual sex, something that matters not very much to Eileen, something that she suspects matters to Ewart only as sex matters to a \u201cman in pain.\u201d Eileen is finally comfortable, having offered solace in a way that comes somewhat easily and undramatically to her.\u00a0Although it is very clear to me that with the sex Eileen has also balanced the scales with her sister\u2019s wealth and perfection, the sex is not meanly done or calculated. It is just what Eileen can do, what her sister cannot do.<\/p>\n The next morning, the sisters have a short conversation in the bedroom, when June is finally honest, finally talks about the death. Eileen listens, says something comforting, and is nevertheless uncomfortable, \u201cfeels cold and tired\u201d and she \u201cmostly wants to get away.\u201d But the expression on her face, which she can see in June\u2019s vanity, is \u201cwonderfully appropriate.\u201d And she puts out her hand.<\/p>\n Munro has Eileen think, \u201cActs done without faith can restore faith.”<\/p>\n The story is great because it shows sisters, once so close, can grow so apart. It is great because it has Eileen remember their father\u2019s death, their mother\u2019s strange reaction to it, the poverty of their childhood. It is great because it shows how death separates, how it confuses, how it freezes. The two sisters and the husband are pushed to their core selves — a core selfishness — and still, and still, they bumble through. The story is also great because it operates on different planes: material, sexual,\u00a0 psychological, and theological. Eileen, in her own way, ministers in this minister-less world.<\/p>\n And it is great because somehow, despite the fact that what Eileen feels is somewhat selfish, and what she does is somewhat careless, the reader senses she has not done the wrong thing. Death is impossible. Sex is one of our answers to death. People are human.<\/p>\n Munro has a respect for the transformative power of sex, for the differences in men\u2019s and women\u2019s experience of it, and also in its necessary part in our lives. Here she makes that perfectly clear.<\/p>\n Munro\u2019s capacity for capturing divided motives, divided emotions, divided people works at its best here.\u00a0Eileen is uncomfortable with her sister, she may be somewhat judgmental, she may even be envious on some level, but she also is June\u2019s and Ewart\u2019s necessary minister. I have to say that I sense Munro\u2019s theology is at work in this story. Just as Munro does not approach feminism in any overt or bombastic way, she also does not approach theology is any programmatic way. But I feel in many stories a soul working on a theology that is appropriate to life, appropriate to nature, appropriate to pain after the death of dogma.<\/p>\n It is ironic that the story appears in a decade when Ingmar Bergman was confronting the silence of God, and Munro in this story has Eileen say that it is people who should be silent in the presence of death. \u201cSilence the only possible thing,\u201d says Eileen.<\/p>\n Ironic also is the fact that story-telling is the opposite of silence. \u201cMemorial,\u201d as do many of Munro\u2019s stories, uses memory, has characters talk and think about the past, has them tell stories about it. Here, June says she\u2019s \u201cworked through all that [. . . and is] finished with it\u201d — all the difficult memories about their poverty and their mother\u2019s \u201ccraziness.\u201d Eileen has worked through nothing; she thinks, awkwardly, that difficult memories should be \u201crespected.\u201d Eileen suspects words, believing as she does in silence. Munro, obviously, is the mediator between these two positions, trying over and over again, as she does again here, to express — with respect, but in words — the craziness of certain mothers.<\/p>\n And the story is great because it demonstrates how perfectly lost the killed boy was. He was hard to know, he is barely spoken of.<\/p>\n And the story is great because it perfectly captures the emptiness that American perfectionism can be.<\/p>\n [\/fusion_text][fusion_text]<\/p>\n![\"Something-I've-Been-Meaning\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/Something-Ive-Been-Meaning.jpg?resize=341%2C530\")
Trevor<\/strong><\/p>\n
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