Life Support: Invitation to Prayer by Judith Cohen Margolis

Abstract

Reviewed by: Life Support: Invitation to Prayer by Judith Cohen Margolis Tahneer Oksman (bio) Life Support: Invitation to Prayer By Judith Cohen Margolis. Pennsylvania State Press, 2019. 96 pp. Judith Cohen Margolis’ Life Support is a small, sturdy book with a gray cloth cover, a long, dangling bookmark adorned with a silver hamsa lodged between its crisp white pages. In her introduction, the writer and artist describes the text as her own created “prayer book,” one in which she brings together, in new fashion, sketches, drawings, journal entries, and paintings chronicling her mother’s final illness, death, and some of what followed. Margolis describes in this opening how, when her mother’s health began to dramatically decline as she reached her seventies after a lifetime of living with diabetes, she, “both as a daughter and as an artist,” felt compelled to capture what was happening. Following this essay, the book is divided into forty-one short chapters, most typed entries reaching the length of a brief paragraph and several covering as much as a page and a half. Interwoven between these entries are the images: sketches of her mother in a hospital bed, with machinery surrounding her; full-color paintings of her mother, breathing tubes attached to her nose; sketches of her father, gloomily or idly slumped in visitor chairs; and an assortment of copies of other relevant paraphernalia from this period of their lives (a loving note from her eight-year-old daughter; a fragmented copy of an invitation for her mother’s seventy-fifth birthday; an old, wrinkled piece of paper with a recipe for making matzo balls). “Only when I am drawing and watching carefully, the observer, does the time seem to pass more gently,” Margolis writes in one of the early entries. “I leave feeling intact, not wrecked” (n.p.). Throughout the text, drawing, and turning to art and work more broadly, is often framed as a salve, an effortful, and meaningful, way of regulating, if only on paper, the mysterious, the uncanny, the unexpected fresh horrors that she is witness to during this time. “I control the panic I feel by writing a careful list describing every piece of machinery and hardware in the room,” she writes in the next entry. “Then [End Page 66] I draw the most complicated gadgets with a .01 Rapidograph pen. This all takes hours, but the time seems to have passed quickly” (n.p.). Throughout her life, as the author/artist explains, her relationship with her mother was often tense, and even until the end her feelings for her mother remained ambivalent. She describes her mother’s lifelong refrain in regard to her daughter: “I love you, but I don’t like you.” Taking note, at this painful stage, allows Margolis, even in light of all her misgivings, her complicated feelings, to draw close, to plant herself in relation to the profound pain experienced, at this juncture, by her mother, her father, her brother, and herself. It also becomes a way of grappling with the images that she does not produce—the ones that, instead, have a hold on her. Those gruesome details she cannot erase from memory. “The image of my mother’s hand is haunting me,” she writes in another early entry. “How will I ever forget it?” (n.p.). Above these typed words, there is a simple sketch of her mother’s soon-to-be-amputated ravaged, swollen hand, the fingers blackened. Beside it, a much smaller sketch divulges four slender, appealing fingers. “Her left hand is still healthy,” the scribbled text beside this mismatched coupling reads. Images, it seems, lead to, sometimes even invite, other images. One way for Margolis to keep the sight of her dying, and later dead, mother from overwhelming her is to draw her way out. But this strategy is not always successful. Halfway through the book, describing her excitement upon an art opening of her paintings, she suddenly asks, “Will I ever get over the image of my mother’s flesh actually rotting like some gruesome horror movie? After all this time, I still can’t get it out of my mind” (n.p.). Like all experiences of grief, unpredictability...