In May 2022, the United States passed a tragic milestone of the coronavirus pandemic: the death of the one millionth American from Covid-19. It takes a writer with the sensitivity and skill of Nicholas Montemarano to transform a statistic, even one as sad and shocking as this one, into a compelling story. If There Are Any Heavens: A Memoir is the heartbreaking account in verse of the death of Montemarano's 79-year-old mother, Catherine, in mid-January 2021, and a profoundly moving portrait of a son's love for his mother.
On January 6, 2021, Montemarano left his home in Lancaster, Pa., where he teaches creative writing at Franklin & Marshall College, and drove 10 hours to the home of his parents in the small town of Nappanee, Ind., their home in retirement. Both his parents had contracted Covid just before Christmas "near the end of the year/ people called the worst." Though his father suffered from an array of what has come to be known in the pandemic era as "co-morbidities," it's his mother who develops double pneumonia, and when her blood oxygen drops to a dangerously low level, she's rushed to the emergency room and then hospitalized.
Montemarano painstakingly documents the final 10 days of his mother's life and of the desperate efforts made to save her. He describes not one, but two "end-of-life" visits, when he is invited to the hospital to spend an hour with his dying mother, but is assured he can "take a little longer if you need/ no rush." Even after the first of these visits, there are moments of hope, when Montemarano and his twin sister, herself a nurse, cling to the belief that if their mother can continue to do her breathing exercises diligently, there is a chance she'll beat the odds and come home to her husband. But in the end, those glimpses of what recovery might look like are extinguished by the disease's relentless course. The mingled feelings of powerlessness and grief Montemarano experiences as the end of his mother's life approaches will be familiar to anyone who has been with a loved one in the final days of an implacable illness.
If There Are Any Heavens is a book whose substance and form match perfectly. Although Montemarano insists that his memoir is "not a poem," his spare, incantatory style is well-suited to his chosen format. He began writing the book a week after his mother's passing, and finished it on the one-month anniversary of her death, and the rawness of his personal grief is palpable. Though his story is specific--a description of only one death among more than a million--his eloquence transports it to the realm of the universal. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer
Shelf Talker: Nicholas Montemarano movingly captures the final days of his mother's life as she succumbs to Covid-19 in early 2021.