Family loss, middle age are themes> Sisters can’t have it all

THE EIGHTH OF SEPTEMBER, Barbara Stevens Sullivan, Astarte Shell Press, Portland, Maine, 1995, 236 pages, $12.95, paperback.

For all the baby boomers who came of age in the late 1960s thinking we could just skip the school of hard knocks and come out better than our parents, middle age is more than a shock. It’s here and it’s damn hard.

Although described as a novel about assisted suicide — a timely theme given Dr. Jack Kevorkian’s self-styled brand of medical care — “The Eighth of September” is more about family dynamics and the inevitable role of loss in human life, particularly those losses that come tumbling down at midlife.

The novel is Sullivan’s first fictional work. A Jungian psychologist, Sullivan is also the author of “Psychotherapy Grounded in the Feminine Principle.” Given the writer’s background, “The Eighth of September” is refreshingly free of psychoanalytic jargon.

Astarte Shell Press, a nonprofit, feminist organization in Portland, has published the novel that focuses on three strong female characters.

“The Eighth of September” begins with death — the “assisted” death of the family dog — and quickly plunges into the various unanticipated losses and even orchestrated ones experienced by two sisters in their 40s and their aging parents, all within an eight-month period in their lives.

As Sullivan truthfully recounts, the Friedman sisters belong to a generation who thought they could have it all — satisfying marriages, wonderful children, lucrative full-time jobs, and parents who age gracefully.

But as sisters Molly and Ellen have found, those assumptions are laced with complexities: marriages rife with unspoken disappointments and betrayal; unresolved issues from childhood that still plague the mother-daughter relationship; pressures of conflicting demands — as wife, parent, daughter and worker.

And for the Friedmans, the heartbreaking decline of their mother’s health brings all those losses into a defining sharp focus, particularly as their mother pushes them to help her end her life.

When the book opens, Shirley Friedman and her husband, Ralph, long married, are barely coping with her physical needs and emotional anxieties as an aging stroke victim. When Ralph suffers a heart attack, and consequently undergoes two bypass operations, the elderly couple see their lives together dramatically altered.

He is no longer the strong nurse-companion to his wife. She lapses increasingly into depression, giving up her earlier zest for political discussion and reading. Their daughters, one suddenly thrust into a divorce and the other wrestling with ambivalent feelings about her mother, must assume new caretaking responsibilities toward their parents while still hanging onto their own lives.

A boarding home for their mother is painfully accepted, just long enough to allow their father to regain some strength. But that decision comes with heartache, as their mother’s decline only intensifies and her loneliness deepens.

Finally, Shirley is brought back home, but with an unwavering belief that she must end her life and her personal misery.

The family-assisted conclusion on the eighth of September comes as no surprise to readers but with few reassurances from the author. There are no stock answers or value-laden judgments about assisted suicide or about family relationships, even though the author spends her professional life listening to people talk about their dilemmas.

Instead, and fortunately, there is truthfulness about the dilemmas, the questions they raise and the gut-wrenching psychic pain they impose. And the growth that can come from loss and from meeting those dilemmas head-on, the author implies, is the real and inescapable stuff of midlife.

No easy answers in this book, one woven around some of life’s most difficult questions and illustrated by richly complex characters.