Life Support by Judith Margolis

Life Support: Invitation to Prayer (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019) is a beautifully published book that feels like a prayer book due to its woven cover and bookmark with a hamsa motif. This is reinforced from the first pages of the book, which list prayer topics.

The author dascribes her mother's illness and death (suffering from diabetes, kidney and heart problems, having to make difficult decisions about her treatment), showing how caring for the sick and mourning is done in Jewish tradition. To make sense of what was going on at the time, the author journaled and drew. She wrote:

"... drawing and writing about illness, death, and bereavement has manifested for me a sense of healing - a trajectory from brokeness to wholeness - that got me through difficult times."

Margolis spent her bereavement year rereading journal entries and painting, channeling her grief into creativity, which is how Life Support came to be and was completed a decade after her mother died. Short journal entries are accompanied by drawings and paintings of her mother in a vulnerable state. As I flipped through the pages, I felt like I shouldn't be looking at those private images of the woman being connected to medical equipment and sleeping, with her husband by her side. This book tames the idea of losing a loved one and I believe I'll come back to it after suffering a similar loss.