September 12, 2011RelicKathleen A. Wakefield

“I was driving, listening to NPR when I heard a report about the return of only a single severed finger from each of three persons killed in Iraq. The story haunted me, and also touched a personal nerve. Over a period of about ten years, my mother went through a series of leg amputations, one leg, then the other, now one above the knee, and so on, because of a rare disease which eventually killed her. A friend who is an Orthodox Jew shared with me the custom of conducting a funeral for each part of the body as it is lost, an excruciatingly concrete reminder of one’s mortality, I thought. At the same time, I saw the great wisdom of recognizing the loss of a part of oneself. I kept wondering how the families in the news story could make peace with their terrible double loss, and so, wishing to offer something, I wrote ‘Relic.’”