Books – Page 2 – Krista Stevens

Head Cases: Stories of Brain Injury and its Aftermath by Michael Paul Mason

Who are we, other than our brains, really?

Mason is a brain injury case manager who explores this question, profiling 12 brain injury survivors and their individual struggle to reconcile their former and present selves.

The brain, the core of our very self, is so powerful, yet shockingly frail. The microscopic connections that make up thoughts, wishes, goals, desires, and memories, are so easily torn asunder, rent by a sudden fall, an accident, that takes them all away, altering the victim irrevocably.

Shear injuries are seemingly the most insidious of brain injuries. Axons and neurons are damaged at the cellular level, breaking microscopic connections across the brain. Because there is no localized, obvious head wound or trauma, shear injuries often go undetected in hospital emergency rooms, leaving the survivor to learn the extent of their injury by countless indignities suffered discovering once effortless skills and abilities suddenly lost.

As a brain injury case manager, Mason fights on behalf of survivors for proper treatment and services to help them to regain not only skills but also their identity and their dignity.

Curtains: Adventures of an Undertaker-in-Training by Tom Jokinen

In Curtains, journalist Tom Jokinen recounts his months as an undertaker-in-training at Neil Bardal’s funeral home in Winnipeg. Under Bardal and his staff, Jokinen shared both sides of the undertaker’s trade–the hands-on skills such as how to dress the sometimes uncooperative dead, and the so-called soft skills, such as how to help the living cope with loss.

Ironically, as more family-owned funeral homes are bought up by international corporations, and more people choose cremation over caskets, embalming, and burial, (the fully-figured–“full-fig” funeral), Jokinen discovers a death industry, that itself is dying–that must resort to selling catering, multi-media memorials, and caricaturish memento mori to make profit from death.

But it wasn’t until twenty-five years ago that Neil (Bardal) finally embraced cremation and became what the mainstream industry calls a “bake-and-shaker,” a lower-cost provider of a cleaner, more manageable, less Gothic and scatterable end product.

“The traditional funeral is gone,” Neil says, “and it’s never coming back.”