My Twice-Lived Life (review)

Book Reviews217 for years and to hit the piano with renewed fervor. Another time, when she looks at the familiar crucifix hanging in her family's haUway she unexpectedly shifts perspective and believes for a moment that a religion whose practitioners hang "a dead guy" in the middle of the house is "as weird as the weirdest thing I'd ever read about in National Geographic." Then, Ansay turns to the piano in order to forget. "Without music, without the line that now plays in my head, I am certain such thoughts would overwhelm me. The tidy truths that have formed my life, like the neatly shaped hedges around my house, would be mowed down, torn away. And then there would be no point to anything—would there?"Ansay must forget —reject the word—in order to live. And yet she must remember— embrace and preserve the word—in order to Uve. Limbo evokes this and other paradoxes oflife with great clarity, insight, and beauty. After she can no longer play the piano, Ansay is left with the word. With the word, she discovers new aspects of herself, her family, and her world. Although she must leave the piano behind, she does not abandon music. Limbo is a book rich in music, whose clear and compeUing narrative Une drives the reader forward with deceptive simplicity. Beneath that line Ansay weaves other fluid, complicated polyphonic notes. This three-part book is complex as a symphony, introducing themes and their variations, compeUing the reader toward a wondrous complicated and epiphonic ending. Reviewed byJocelyn Bartkevicius My Twice-Lived Life by Donald Murray BaUantine Books, 2001 214 pages, cloth, $21.95 My Twice-Lived Life is an apt title for Donald Murphy's memoir, for it is about the life that preceded his heart attack at age 63. The setting ofthe first chapter, "An Unexpected Life," is the St. Petersburg, Florida, Bayfront Medical Center Cardiac Intensive Care Unit, where Murray, conscious, lies calm as nurses fight to save his life. What he notices is the "calm professionalism " of the staff, who go about theirjob in an efficient and exacting manner . This, we learn, is a trait that Murray shares with these hard-working individuals. Murray, unafraid of the prospect of death, speculates as to why, in this moment of crisis, he is both observant and detached. Murray writes, "In 218Fourth Genre times ofstress, most members ofmy generation reach back to the myths of our ethnicity. I am a Scot. I am tough; we confront terror with a joke. We'd better have a sense of humor if our men wear skirts to war." Murray attributes his ability to simultaneously distance and record what is going on around him to his upbringing. His father, Murray recaUs, "would meet mother at the door and I would get a beating. Sometimes I hid before he came home, but I never felt it was a personal act; I could detach myselffrom the whiplash pain of the leather shaving strap. I knew aU about cause and effect." Murray believes that most others who survived WWII infantry combat share his mixed feelings about being emotionaUy distanced from a job that required them "to do what had to be done." Nevertheless, in having survived both a heart attack and triple bypass surgery, Murray is euphoric. However, five days after his release from the hospital, as he's walking down a drugstore aisle, he's beset by two thoughts: he could have another heart attack; and he's going to have to develop a different mindset if he's to prevent this from happening again. He writes, "I had survived the week-long, immediate testing ofa heart attack and surgery, but now I would have to learn a different skill of alert patience, read my body know that there would be many false alarms. . . ." Murray knows that he's going to have to pay closer attention to his now more vulnerable physical self. But only later does he recognize that the mind and body are connected. This realization comes in the foUowing chapters as the Pulitzer prize—winning journalist looks at his old life in the posthospitalization context of his new Ufe...