Wayne Courtois

Yes, I know, when you read a book you should try to judge it for the book itself and not for your personal experience, above all if the book is not fiction, but a memoir. People are different and they behave in a different way in front of the same event. Anyway, I can't read a book about a dying parent, without recalling my personal experience: I lost my father when I was 19 years old, and he was ill, terminally ill, for the last three years. In particular the last year I couldn't do anything if not spending hours and hours near his bed, or in the next proximity, waiting. My father was a very strong man, and even if the illness made him weak, he never once wanted to impose on me or my brother. So no, we couldn't help him, and he rarely spoke. Only twice he acknowledged his illness with him, once when he was still hoping to have a chance to fight it back, we were on car, he driving, and he told me that the last months had been hard, but he was probably good now. He wasn't. The second time it was some month before his death, when he had to go to a funeral of a friend of his who didn't manage to survive cancer, the same cancer my father had. I went with him, losing one day of school but my mother and I thought my father shouldn't be alone, and outside the church, waiting for the service to end (my father was atheist and didn't like to enter churches, neither for a funeral), he told me that he didn't want a funeral, and above all not in church. Now you have to understand that in Italy there is no any other way to have a service if not in church. We haven't funeral home, we usually don't cremate. But this is another story, enough to say that my father had a service on the street, with hundreds of people attending, all standing. I think my father would have liked it.

Sorry for the long preamble but it was necessary for you to understand that no, I wasn't really in the mood to read A Report from Winter, I didn't want to recall all I went through. But I promised that I would have given the book a chance and so I did. And I was soon surprised: A Report from Winter is a total different experience from mine. What Wayne is going through is not the sickening pain of a son who desperately doesn't want to loose his parent, Wayne is so estranged from his family, and his family from him, that he arrives to his mother death bed when she is so far on the illness that it seems she neither acknowledges his presence. And the people who are there, the one that I thought were lovingly taking care of an old dear mum, are more like two block of stone, unmoved by the events, only waiting for the death to arrive to finally being able to go back to their usually routine.

No this is not the heartbreaking narration of the death of a loving one, it's more the journey back to hell of a man that was trying to forget that that world still existed. Or at least I thought so at the beginning. Wayne was cold, his relatives were cold, the city was cold, the winter was cold. Like an ice shield around everything in this book, it was almost impossible to break through. And then little by little, the ice around Wayne melts, and the reader has the chance to see a different him, someone who probably is regretting some choice, even if, truth be told, they were the only possible and right, and healthy, for him to do. Also with the arriving of Ralph, Wayne's partner, we have the chance to see a different Wayne, and we realize that, the one we met at the beginning, was a little boy who was scared to come back, and that was wearing a ice cold mask to shield himself from any possible hurt.

There is not sudden revelation of an unknown true, there are no miraculously changes, only maybe the realization that, if a little boy thought his mother didn't love him, maybe it was since she herself wasn't loved before, and she didn't learn how to share things. There is maybe a man who remembers that, after all, his mother thought to him, in little things she did. And there is maybe the realization that, no, it wasn't useless for him to come back to say a final goodbye, because if he didn't do that, he would have regretted it for the rest of his life. Wayne had to know that his mother loved him, only she had a way to love him that wasn't the fictional love you are used to see on television or cinema.

I also loved the glimpse in Wayne's story with Ralph, the retelling of their first date, ended without even a kiss, and Wayne's pain afterward, a pain soon soothed by a simple phone call by Ralph, it was sweet and true.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/1590212355/?tag=elimyrevandra-20… (més)

By the time Wayne Courtois got to his mother’s deathbed, she was no longer able to communicate and he was never quite sure she even knew he was there. Courtois had not seen his mother, or the rest of his family, for ten years when he arrived in frozen Maine feeling somewhat guilty about his long absence. “A Report from Winter” explains why it happened that way.

Wayne Courtois and his older brother Bruce grew up in a family in which emotions and feelings were largely ignored. Certainly, they were never expressed out loud or through any kind of physical intimacy. The one exception to the rule was the anger into which his mother would erupt at seemingly random moments, anger that often culminated with her expressing her utter contempt for Wayne, her youngest son. Wayne’s mother paid so little attention to the feelings of her sons that he grew up believing that having an emotional life was a secret best kept to himself. Open communication was so taboo in the Courtois family, in fact, that Wayne still believes that his parents died without the knowledge that both their sons are gay.

Finding it difficult to cope with his emotions while waiting for his mother to die, and having no one in the family with whom he can share his feelings, Wayne reluctantly decides to ask his partner, Ralph, to join him from Kansas City. The close relationship of the two men, and the unquestioning support Ralph provides in this moment of crisis, underscore everything wrong with Wayne’s family and transforms “A Report from Winter” into a remarkable story.

Wayne Courtois is one of those writers whose prose is almost effortless to read. One is left with the impression that his memoir is a brutally honest one, a book that is unlikely to be appreciated by his brother or his Aunt Louise, the two family members who spent some time with him at his mother’s bedside. He has little good to say about either of them, and readers of “A Report from Winter” will certainly understand why that is after reading the flashbacks to an incident from Wayne’s childhood which alternate with chapters about his mother’s death.

When he arrived in Portland that day in 1998, Wayne was not sure what to expect. As he puts it, “With a start I realized that, while I hadn’t taken this journey to indulge in self-contemplation, I’d be doing plenty of it whether I liked it or not. My goal might eventually be to get the hell out of here with my short supply of self-esteem intact.” Thanks to Ralph, I think Wayne Courtois left Maine with his self-esteem stronger than ever.

Rated at: 4.0… (més)