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Reviewed by:
  • Phantom Limb
  • Audrey K. Gordon
Phantom Limb. By Janet Sternburg. American Lives Series. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2003. Pp. 148. $12.95 (paperback).

"Phantom limb begins with dismembering, but it can become remembering." Phantom Limb is a reminiscence of the author's encounters with the illnesses and deaths of her parents, and the memories they stimulate of her life with them and other members of her family.

Taking care of aged parents is one of the most gut-wrenching and ambivalent experiences faced by adult children. When the parents who gave us life become dependent upon us, they are often uncomfortable with the role reversal and may act like defiant or needy children. Rarely are either the parent or the adult child able to interact in neutral or rational ways. Sternburg uses her writing to explore her grief as she cares for her parents and experiences their dying. In reference to her father's death, she says, "I've never been able to synchronize my feelings with the occasion. Things hit later." "Later" is this reason for this book, a collection of previously published materials revised or altered to fit the themes of the importance of memory, caregiving and illness as they impact family relationships. Sternburg wishes to provide "the subtle words that allow for degrees between healthy and sick, descriptive words for naming the in-between states where we spend so much of our lives. . . . We need a new language of pain so we don't [End Page 156] experience it simply as a message delivered by an insulted nerve." Her writing becomes "a vocabulary of singular words that, when near one another, let us read pain as a story of all that has happened in our lives."

The many illnesses within her family as she was growing up, combined with her own early bout with rheumatic fever and later breast cancer, sensitized Sternburg to the unspoken pain of ordinary people suffering under the burdens of physical and mental illness. I tried to recall childhood memories of illness in my own family, but I could not recall details of anything outside my immediate family. Not so with the author, who early on absorbed the meaning of illness as it shaped the interactions of her parents, cousins, aunts, and uncles towards each other and with her.The illnesses involved loss: the loss of her mother's limbs, the loss of her father's abilities to think and speak after dementia and a stroke, the loss of feeling after the "minimal lobotomy" of a suicidal aunt deserted by her husband, the loss of normal relationships due to an uncle's schizophrenia, the author's own loss of a breast.

The title of the book is a metaphor for how the brain works to produce memory.Although Sternburg's language about the illnesses she observes is decidedly nonclinical, it appears that her mother had worsening peripheral vascular disease and, at separate times, loses her legs. She records her mother's struggles as an amputee, her loss of independence, her move to a nursing home—and her own grief over the loss of the mother she has known. After an amputation, we are told, "amputees are routinely instructed to slap their stumps in order to simulate a phantom limb."The brain requires this stimulation so that when a prosthesis is strapped on, the phantom "shoots out and fills it," allowing the brain to accept the artificial leg as part of the body, able to be used for walking. A phantom limb can also convince the brain that it is feeling pain, or itches, or has a problem with a toe. But the "phantom limb" is also the author's attempt to stimulate the presence of her parents and family who are now absent from her life. These memories convince her brain that they are still with her.

The word limb has many different meanings for the author. A tree limb moves as she sits on it in California—somehow her mother is present. She falls repeatedly after her mother's death—"Had the ground really been pulled out from under my feet"? Parents and family are parts of who we...

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