Fig.2: Fies, Brian: Mom’s Cancer. New York: Abrams Image, 2006, p.26.

In a series of snapshot-like panels depicting Fies’ mother, the graphics swiftly trace the story time of her hair loss during chemotherapy within the space of a single page, while the speech balloons assemble her different reactions to the cause of her cancer, ending in a confession of defiance by her (Fies, 26). These panels are bookended by borderless texts contrasting the mother-son relationship of the past with the patient-caregiver relationship of the present: a role reversal suffused with helplessness and regret. Whereas in the past, the son had persistently pleaded with his mother to stop smoking but to no avail (»Mom smoked for forty-five years. I nagged her to stop almost from the day I could talk«), in the present, the caregiver feels no satisfaction from being proven right about his concerns (»Somehow, saying ›I told you so‹ turned out to be a lot less satisfying than I imagined«, Fies, 26).

The passing of time demonstrated through the swift corporeal changes in Fies’ mother’s appearance is contrasted with a moment of stillness. To visualize the suspension of time experienced by the patient during long hours of chemotherapy, Fies draws his mother like a portrait »arrangement in Grey and Black,« sleeping in a hospital chair (Fies, 33). The splash page fills the entire space with this single image – locating the patient’s treatment at the narrative centre, and also conveying a sense of time expectant (fig. 3).

Fig.3: Fies, Brian: Mom’s Cancer. New York: Abrams Image, 2006, p.33.

The visual itself, as well as the title, »Arrangement in Grey and Black« references James Whistler’s renowned 1871 portrait of his mother, popularly known as ›Whistler’s Mother.‹ The visual reference introduces a sense of continuity of mother-son relationships across generations, as well as a sense of poignant irony: unlike Whistler’s mother, who is sitting in a chair in her own house, unimpeded by any apparent disease, Fies’ mother is sitting in a hospital chair undergoing chemotherapy. Within the graphic narrative, the centralized present-time image of the frail patient under treatment is contrasted with two visuals. The first visual is a past image: a sketch of an old family photograph where the mother is visibly younger and the stepfather is present (he is now absent, having abandoned his family responsibilities). This photograph functions as a reminder of both past happiness and past losses, thus counterbalancing the present trauma through the contrasts and continuities with the past (Fies, 34). This is followed by graphics that contrast the chaos of the caregivers’ present time with the silent image of the patient (fig. 4).

Fig.4: Fies, Brian: Mom’s Cancer. New York: Abrams Image, 2006, p.42.

Fies draws a series of panels in glaring colours, metaphorizing the caregivers (himself and his two sisters) as fractious, battling superheroes to indicate the immense responsibilities as well as the frustrations of caregiving each of them feels (Fies, 42). The »temporal incongruence« that arises among »intimates,« according to Charmaz (who limits her observation to the patient-caregiver relationship) may also extend – as Fies visualizes – among multiple caregivers, when caring is a shared responsibility, and their disparate temporal priorities can result in conflict: »conflict emerges when making daily schedules and projecting timetables« (Charmaz, 172). The three siblings argue about who is the »oldest« and therefore should take »charge« of treatment procedures and schedules, about how Nurse Sis is more entitled to control because she has »got medical power of attorney,« and how Kid Sis insists on having control because, »Hel-lo?! I’ve actually got to live with her!« (Fies, 42; emphasis in original). Fies exposes the discordance that is often enmeshed with cooperation and a mutual concern in the process of caregiving, how »perfectly nice families could disintegrate in a crisis« (41).

Gore narrates her complex experiences of caregiving through a mother-daughter centric lens, and her experiences of caregiving are deeply embedded in, and influenced by, her complicated, emotionally abusive relationship with her mother. Gore’s sister, Leslie, who shares this conflicted relationship with their mother, lives away from them, and participates in caregiving only minimally. Gore calls her to disclose their mother’s diagnosis, she feels comforted, but also realizes that the labor of caregiving is hers alone: »I’m the one who has to take care of her« (Gore, 24-25).⁵  The rope of time is inextricably knotted for Gore, and the past mother-daughter ambiguities and conflicts intervene continuously on the present patient-caregiver relationship: »When I was a little girl I wanted nothing more than my mother’s attention. My beautiful mother. But she had more important people and things to attend to. Now I sat with her dying, sat steeped in boredom« (Gore, 171). Gore repeatedly reveals the vulnerabilities and anxieties of caregiving. Upon learning the diagnosis, she keeps having »visions« of her mother »getting sicker in a hospital bed in the little room that used to be my office,« »visions« of her mother »getting thinner« (Gore, 22). These visions emphasize her fears about how her mother’s illness will visibly and unavoidably encroach upon her sovereign space and time. A recurrent question that haunts her is, »How am I going to take care of her?« even as she remonstrates with herself, »Pull yourself together, Ariel« (Gore, 23; emphases in original). When a Facebook friend consoles her, »You did your best,« she thinks, »But had I? Done my best? I felt like a failure« (Gore, 101; emphases in original). Even as she exposes the gendered imbalance of caregiving, her guilt is produced by a self-perceived failure to perform the culturally expected role of the ideal daughter-caregiver: »People’s mothers got cancer all the time. People without sisters or money or health insurance or sex lives or salted chocolate. They didn’t whine about it. Women all over the world were caregivers even if they were breadwinners. They dealt with it« (Gore, 25). Her fear and guilt are knotted up in the rope of time: the roots of her fear of her mother’s invading her perceived present may be traced to her troubled past, but her fear and guilt both extend to an imagined future where she may be culturally judged as an inadequate caregiver/daughter. Her present autonomous time is threatened by the diagnosis in two ways—the possibility of her mother disrupting this autonomy and replicating the past, and also of future invasive judgments that may affect her precarious autonomous self.

Fies focuses more on the patient, on her cancer and treatment, but he, too, shares his feelings of inadequacy as a caregiver. He »doubts« that his role as a caregiver is »gonna be enough« because »all [he] has to offer is this:« »I unhelpfully tell her things she already knows,« drives her to and from hospital visits, does the household chores that she cannot manage on her own, brings her food, lends »a steadying arm, laugh at a morbid joke, and compliment a bad wig« (Fies, 25; emphasis in original). Although the list comprehensively covers physical, practical and emotional support, Fies’ »doubt« replicates Gore’s sense of »failure.« Even when Fies emphasizes the collective efforts of caregiving, he enmeshes it with a sense of underlying inadequacy and dissonance: »Everyone is doing everything they can. But some of it conflicts, and none of it is enough. The stakes are too high.« (41) Cancer is an enormous disruptor, not just of the patient’s body, mind and time, but also, by extension, of the caregivers’ times and relationships: and one part of this disruption is caused by the unpredictability and unknowability of cancer’s future time. Like Fies, who reads and collects expert-written articles on cancer in order to (not very successfully) understand the disease, Gore also attempts to »distract« herself »with academic articles on death;« however, these articles appear to be more focused on increasing her understanding and acceptance of death rather than the more fact-oriented research that Fies does (Fies, 24; Gore, 37). She mentions one »academic« article, »Dying in a Technological Society« by »brainy doctor Eric Cassell« and concludes that the modern American attitude to death has »moved from a moral mythology to a technological mythology, so we’d come to see death as something to be overcome. Death was like a broken appliance – just a mechanical problem to be investigated, solved and fixed« (Gore, 37). Concurring with Cassell’s critique of the comparison of the human to the mechanical, of the complete absence of any metaphysical temporal dimension to the experience of life and death, Gore, too, considers the expert medical jargon of illness and death limited and insufficient. Gore’s memoir exposes how death is more than a medical process of diagnosis and successful or failed treatment; she explores the existential uncertainties that underlie the experience of cancer. At one point early in the narrative, she writes, »My mother still didn’t need much in terms of care, but I was trying to make the calls friends told me I should make, trying to plan for a future I didn’t understand« (Gore, 76). The responsibility of the caregiver is not limited to the physical duties of caring for an ill patient, but also extends to planning for an uncertain and horizonless future that has to be navigated blindly with the added stress produced by lack of any certainty of knowledge, understanding or, sometimes, support.

Rebecca Olson conceptualizes »coping strategies« of caregivers as »›internal mechanisms‹ that serve to moderate emotional responses to threatening events such as illness« which are »used to decrease the stress of the response through either changing the environment (problem-focused coping) or changing feelings about the situation (emotion-focused coping)« (56). She identifies »emotion-focused coping strategies« as including »denial, detachment, restraining feelings or avoidance,« and »problem-focused coping« as including »seeking information, assessing the problem, getting guidance;« she also cautions that »emotion-focused coping« may be linked to »negative psychological outcomes such as higher rates of anxiety, depression and burden, while problem-focused coping is linked with positive psychological outcomes, such as reduced stress« (Olson 56). Although it is evident from Gore’s and Fies’ testimonies that it is not always possible to binarize coping strategies in this way, and that the same caregiver may experience temporal phases of reduced stress as well as increased anxiety, we may also consider how Fies’ pragmatic, fact-oriented research resembles Olson’s problem-focused coping, whereas Gore’s persistent restraining of her ambiguous feelings for her mother’s illness may be considered to be an emotion-focused response, generating the need for consolation. For Gore, the consolation that she seeks as a witness and caregiver during her mother’s cancer comes not from the prevalent expert medical language that she encounters, which can neither ›solve‹ nor ›fix‹ the ›mechanical problem,‹ but from alternative sources of healing like »The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying« by Sogyal Rinpoche, where the old master tells the young writer who is witnessing death, »It’s happening now. I have no further advice for you. You are fine as you are: I am happy with you« (Gore, 180-181). Here, the consolation comes from acceptance, both of the inevitability of events in time, and of not being judged for one’s responses to these events.

There are also several instances when Gore chooses to prioritize her own time over the constant demands of caregiving, although she always makes arrangements for alternative paid or voluntary carers to look after her ailing mother. In one such episode, when she has a »writing workshop« she chooses not to cancel it, although the process is limned with guilt: she asks her partner, »Do you think…if I go to Iowa, she’ll be alive when I get back?« (Gore, 163). Every decision on future time contains a tussle between self-care and caregiving, a sense of relief versus a sense of guilt. While the emotional turbulence Gore feels inhibits her decision-making for the future, the oncologist, on the other hand, does not accommodate this factor in his prognosis. He projects a »worst case scenario« in which her mother suffers »complete paralysis within six months« and would »need round-the-clock care at home,« where Gore would have to consult the »social worker;« the same expert states, »off the record I don’t think Medicare will cover it« (Gore, 146). Such a need-focused discourse reveals a lack of empathy for the patient’s and caregiver’s situation. The expert suggests what the patient needs rather than offering possible solutions to fulfil this need, and does not consider the caregiver’s needs at all. The out-of-hospital future time of the patient is shifted as the caregiver’s primary responsibility. However, Gore is also not afraid to reach out to her and Eve’s friends to seek support in her caregiving duties. She emails these friends, informing them that her mother is in »home hospice care« and requests: »I need friends willing to come for a few days or week each to help her here at home. Please let me know if you can take on any time in February or March« (Gore, 153). She makes a combined caregiving schedule, arranges all the material, medical and temporal details, and thus shares the lonely burden of caregiving and the time it consumes with this community of carers. In this way, Gore’s memoir exposes the limitations of monopolistic medical discourses of illness and suggests alternative sources of coping and consolation.

Olson (whose sociology of cancer caregiving focuses only on patients who are cared for by spouses) identifies three types of carers: »time-sovereign carers« who care for patients whose »treatment« are »not debilitating« and who do not have »other substantial ›claimants‹ on their time;« »time-poor carers« who look after patients »whose cancer and treatment« are »debilitating« and so have to provide round-the-clock »personal care« as well as »social and emotional support« but who do not have »other demands on their time;« and »time-destitute« carers who have »little control over their time due to the number and time-intensity of the multiple roles« they juggle, including »paid work, other caregiving responsibilities and childcare« (103). Since Fies shares caregiving responsibilities with his siblings, he may be categorized as a ›time-sovereign‹ carer, and, as his narrative demonstrates, he utilizes caregiving time to remember, reconnect with, and record his mother’s past (Fies, 50–52). Olson notes that time-sovereign carers have more time to grow »closer to the care-recipient,« unlike time-destitute carers (111). It is more difficult to categorize Gore, because although she has paid work and childcare, she also has access to professional and voluntary carers. Olson conceptualizes »time-sovereignty« categories as »fluid,« and Gore’s narrative manifests the shifting boundaries among time-sovereign, time-poor and time-destitute caregiving which, thus, »need to be continuously reassessed« (Olson, 113). Gore’s closeness to her mother follows a troubled, uneven arc: when she is experiencing time-destitute caregiving, she feels less emotionally close to her mother than when she is experiencing time-sovereign caregiving and can reconnect more deeply with her. Often experiencing time-destitute caregiving, Gore prefers »practical support which gives [her] more time to juggle [her] competing roles or indeed, time to feel,« in the way that Fies does with his mother in possibly less complicated ways (Olson, 112).

Ending Time

Although she performs a ritual countdown, Gore’s mother lives long beyond her self-projected date of death, and even beyond the doctors’ expectations of her life span. Her »Perceived Present« rope of time stretches, extending into and fragmenting her »Imagined Future« (Hannum and Rubinstein, 19). Gore narrates, »On the morning my mother thought she would die, she marched out into the living room in her leopard-print robe« (88). This indicates another incongruence between the patient’s temporal perspective (what she thought would happen) and temporal structure (what actually happens). Her mother’s cancer is »unusually slow-growing,« although it metastasizes to her spine and brain (Gore, 145). Mirroring this latency, The End of Eve negotiates the slow-moving rope of time through multiple chapters intermeshing past and present; memories, dreams and emotionally-charged encounters. Gore shifts from being primary caregiver to visiting caregiver, assisted by paid palliative care nurses, and volunteering family and friends. She emphasizes the rising costs and unforgiving exhaustions of indefinite, long-term caregiving. At one point in the memoir, Gore writes, »My mother is never going to die... It had been two months since her release from the hospital... How could I explain the depths of my exhaustion? I knew I should be living in the present, in these ugly and sacred moments... But I was glad my mother wasn’t all I had« (180). Living through indefinitely continuing exhaustions of caregiving, Gore relies on her sovereign time for self-care. Bitter mother-daughter confrontations interrupt the Gore’s terrain of caregiving time and again. At one point, Gore writes, »She was just an abusive bitch who happened to have cancer« (97). At another, Gore’s mother shrieks, »I hate you... You’ve got everything and I’ve got nothing, all right?... You have a life and I don’t have a life« (180). Gore’s friend asks her, »What does it mean for life to bear witness to death?« (179). Gore chooses not to answer this central question of caregiving, and also of reading illness memoirs. Exposing the simultaneous, interlocked, yet irreconcilable timelines of mother and daughter, patient and caregiver, the writer and her subject, the constantly deferring narrative pulls the reader in to witness a slow wait; shifting between and blurring the binaries of »love and abuse,« closeness and distance, defiantly living and gradually dying (Gore, 165).

As Gore’s mother shifts from alternative therapy to chemotherapy, there is one vivid description that is reminiscent of Fies’ mother’s still, frail image in »Arrangement in Gray and Black:« »She sat propped in a chair, her eyes closed, head back and mouth open. Surrounded by machines that beeped and glowed. An oxygen tube in her nose. I stepped back from the doorway to steady my breath. What had I expected, anyway? The mother of my childhood? Dark 1970s perm? Defined biceps, still strong enough to leave a mark when she hit me?« (Gore, 140). Like Fies, Gore flashbacks to the past. The present disrupts and contrasts starkly with past memories, yet past and present are linked through a continuity of suffering and loss. Witnessing the two still images – of Fies’ mother and Gore’s mother – recalls Charmaz’s explication of »dragging and drifting time:«

When an individual is plunged into a serious episode, two main ways of experiencing time stand out: the dragging time of pain and suffering, and the drifting time of loss of consciousness. During the agony of pain, time lengthens. Moments expand and swell without end. […] Drifting time, in contrast, spreads out. Like a fan, drifting time unfolds and expands during a serious immersion in illness. This time is the elusive, slowed time when an immobile individual regains consciousness. Time drifts when action remains so limited. Yet drifting time also includes the amorphous, floating time when someone slips in and out of sleep or consciousness. Time elapses without awareness. Then, lengthy periods of clock-time collapse quickly into seemingly short durations. (90–91)

Charmaz’s observations are based on her interviews with patients with chronic illnesses, while as readers, we witness Fies’ or Gore’s mother through the filter of the caregiver/authors’ representation. Hence, it may not be possible to demarcate dragging time from drifting time while observing the patient from the outside – as we are doing – but the stillness of the graphic and word images seems to indicate an experience of immersive time, which can be elongated or collapsed or both. There are instances in Gore’s memoir where the sense of ›dragging time‹ as well as rushing time is acutely experienced by Gore, the caregiver, herself. When her mother’s illness is prolonged beyond medical expectations, and Gore is emotionally traumatized because of her ongoing quarrel and separation from her mother as well as the looming uncertainty of future time, she writes: »This was supposed to be a book about a typical caregiver – a daughter with children of her own trying to help her terminal if eccentric widow-mother through a final year. But now here we were mid-narrative, more than a year gone by, and no one had died and I didn’t have a mother anymore and the semester was wrapping up. Soon I wouldn’t have a job« (110). Whereas her own unsettled, possibly unemployed future seems to be approaching too fast, her mother’s present illness is stretching too long, creating disorienting anomalies of temporal expectations.

The terminal chapters of Gore’s memoir narrate her mother’s accelerating corporeal deterioration, but also moments of stubborn resistance. The »lead hospice nurse« comments, »Your mother isn’t following any of the normal patterns,« referring to her »unbelievable« reverse progression from »soft foods to complex solid foods,« and to »the bedsore« that is »beginning to heal« (Gore, 169; emphasis added).⁶ The normative medical framework of a terminally ill cancer patient is that of gradual deterioration: »Normally a patient might go from soft foods to liquids. Then she might start refusing food all together. That would tell us she had just a few days« (Gore, 169; emphasis added). Yet, Gore’s mother’s body disobeys these normative assumptions of patient time through an extraordinary temporal reversal that does not ›tell‹ or disclose any confirmation of standardized medical diagnosis or symptoms. There are several such instances when Gore’s mother seemingly refuses to conform to medical expectations. On one such occasion, Lara, the professional caregiver from a community care centre, calls Gore over to visit her mother for the final time, »Your mother is passing today. All the signs are here« (183). After Gore sits with her »for a long time,« watching her breathe, her mother »opened her eyes and jerked up, staring at the two of us sitting there. The whisper of the heart sutra, the hiss of oxygen. ›What? Did you think I was dead? I want an omelet.‹ She shook her head and cackled« (184). Gore’s mother’s appetite for living – metaphorized through her appetite for food and for arguing with her daughter and others – elongates the time allotted to her by experts and openly challenges the expected medical chrononormativity about patient time and body. Gore’s mother wants to write her own memoir, and to celebrate life-affirming feasts and festivals.

However, the resilience of body and spirit that Gore’s mother projects is always accompanied with signs of gradually increasing physical debilitation. Gore can identify the visible ravages of cancer on her mother, »she had that look of death now – eyes sunken, teeth too prominent« (155). The visibilization of illness is matched with an increase of physical suffering: »I read the caregiver logs in the mornings. Nights of vomiting and pain« (Gore, 161). Yet, in the midst of increasing pain, Gore’s mother wishes to memorialize her own life, and she also wishes to continue the family’s traditional feasts. Charmaz notes, »Increasing immersion in illness leads to becoming consumed by needs and feelings; people turn inward. Turning inward to self ranges from explicit, direct, and immediate focusing on the ill self to broader self-concerns that a person relates to illness« (Charmaz, 99). For Gore’s mother, turning inward is accompanied by a desire to memorialize her past self, possibly the self before illness, a desire for a posthumous permanence that resists the frail transience of her body: »Can I tell you a story, Tiniest? For my memoir? I am too tired to type« (Gore, 172). Her other concern – celebrating the cycle of festivals – also indicate the need for continuity and stability provided by cyclical celebrations in the face of encroaching uncertainty: »[I]t’s Passover. We have to prepare a Seder. The leg of lamb. All the dishes.« (Gore, 186).

Gore’s mother dies on Easter, but Gore celebrates because her mother had planned the menu and had been »so looking forward to her feast:« »And I set the table with my Gammie’s silver, set a place for my mother, too, poured her a glass of red Zinfandel…« (Gore, 187–188). After months of latency, the rope of time enables the daughter to ›reconcile‹ the projected future death with the present reality, as she memorializes and celebrates her mother through the glass of wine. The memoir then moves forward into the post-death stage: a time of grieving and healing, ending with Gore anchoring the rope of time between her past and present identities: »I was once somebody’s daughter. And now I am free« (Gore, 198). Within the framework of the graphic narrative, Fies’ mother’s story ends differently. It is a story of »progress,« of cancer in remission, of the fortunate »one of the five percent who makes it« (Fies, 80; 92). Fies’ mother also chooses to celebrate life-affirming occasions, like her own birthday, when she is colour-drawn as the »belle of the ball« in contrast to the monochromatic background of the party (Fies, 82). Here, as elsewhere in the narrative, Fies emphasizes the affirmative, communal aspect of caregiving: »Mom can’t do much herself, of course. Nurse Sis, Kid Sis, and I divide the duties and go to work« to plan a busy future »goal« for their mother, »something good to look forward to« (81). However, Fies also emphasizes the difference between the certainty of »cure« and the contingency of »remission« –»Vigilance will define the rest of her days… watching for anywhere a stray cancer cell might strike roots« (101). Arthur Frank’s concept of the »remission society« describes all those – including cancer patients in remission – who are »effectively well but could never be considered cured« (Frank, 8). The rope of time in remission will perpetually be unfixed and under threat. However, Fies’ epilogue expands the possibilities rather than the precarity of the future. In the final three pages, the past, present and future are reconciled, as Fies’s mother and sisters relocate to Hollywood, a place associated with their shared happy past. The crisis of cancer pushes his mother to take this risky, wish-fulfilling step: »But mom always wanted to live in Southern California. I guess she figured it was now or never« (Fies, 110). The rope of time is imaged as the long road unfurling into a future that cannot be gauged beyond the horizon (fig. 5).

Fig.5: Fies, Brian: Mom’s Cancer. New York: Abrams Image, 2006, p.110.

In the final panels, Fies projects further into the yet un-visibilized, braided, yet individual futures of his sisters and his mother, labelling it as »coming soon, « a future that is still being written (Fies, 111). These imagined futures (of his sisters and his mother) are written in present continuous text-boxes against the calming blue backdrop of the night sky: »Kid Sis is taking screenwriting classes […]. / Nurse Sis is getting certified […] / Mom is working hard to feel better and restart her life. Look for her in the crowd scenes of major motion pictures … coming soon to a theater near you« (Fies, 111; emphases added). The last page of Fies’ memoir comprises two separate wordless panels of the night sky, the top panel with a few twinkling stars. The absence of words multiplies the resonances of this page: whether it implies hope, or consolation, or condolence will depend upon individual readings at specific points of time. A little earlier in the memoir, Fies writes, »When I started, I thought my story was about death. It turned out to be about hope« (104). While documenting his experiences, he realises, »I knew we weren’t alone« (Fies, 103). Gore, in contrast, writes, »Trauma, by its very definition, can’t be fully experienced in the moment. Due to the suddenness or the enormity of the traumatic event, we just can’t take it in. So, we have to go back to it at some point – either literally or symbolically – to integrate whatever happened. We can do that consciously, in some safe way, or we’re destined to revisit the trauma over and over again as the violence of life« (175). Yet she also realises how the rope of time holds out possibilities: »[As] long as we’re alive there’s time for reinvention; time to imagine some way to integrate the enormity of it all« (Gore, 197).

Hannum and Rubinstein suggest that »cancer’s emotional and physical burdens« necessitate perceptions of time becoming »fractured and fragmented« (19). Although they restrict their analysis to older cancer patients, in the caregiving memoirs we have studied here – where the narration of the patient’s cancer experience is relayed through the caregiver – we may add that the experience of extraordinary, fractured time is also extended to the caregiver’s lived experience. The caregiver-narrators witness the patient’s experience and document it as they document their own responses, needs, pressures and emotions, which often echo a similar fracturing and fragmentation. In the introduction to their anthology of illness narratives, Sayantani Dasgupta and Martha Hurst write: »The illness narrative does not merely reflect the experience of illness; it contributes to that experience by giving coherence, symbolism, and meaning to what might otherwise have been a chaotic experience« (1). Although there are multiple and unique ›chaotic experiences‹ lived by countless individual patients and caregivers, there may be shared feelings and common meanings. Gore provides »nutshell statistics« that »give a universal context to a personal story:« »In any given year, almost 30% of the U.S. population will be caring for an ill, disabled, or ageing friend or family member. The caregiver will offer an average of 20 hours a week in unpaid labor and over $5,000 a year in out-of-pocket expenditures. […] The typical caregiver, it turns out, is me: An adult female with children of her own caring for her widowed mother« (55–56). The statistics that Gore cites for the United States may be expanded to include wider geographies and cultural contexts. For the writers and artists of caregiving memoirs, recording their trauma, navigating and processing the rope of time are also methods of revisiting, repairing and healing. It is a pertinent step for caregivers, for their time, too, is limited and valuable. For readers, reading such narratives – whether graphic or literary – may also help in engaging with their own timelines of dependencies, trauma and healing in consciously-chosen, safe and shared ways.

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Bibliography

• Charmaz, Kathy: Good Days, Bad Days: The Self in Chronic Illness and Time. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991.
• Chast, Roz: Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant? New York: Bloomsbury, 2014.
• Czerwiec, MK, Ian Williams, Susan Merrill Squier, Michael J. Green, Kimberley R. Myers and Scott T. Smith: Graphic Medicine Manifesto. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015.
• Dasgupta, Sayantani, and Martha Hurst: The Gendered Nature of Illness. In: Stories of Illness and Healing: Women Write their Bodies. Eds. Sayantani Dasgupta and Martha Hurst. Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 2007, p. 1–7.
• Fies, Brian: Mom’s Cancer. New York: Abrams Image, 2006.
• Frank, Arthur, W.: The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995.
• Freeman, Elizabeth: Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.
• Gore, Ariel: The End of Eve: A Memoir. Portland: Hawthorne Books, 2014.
• Hannum, Susan. M., and Robert L. Rubinstein: The meaningfulness of time: Narratives of cancer among chronically ill older adults. In: Journal of Aging Studies 36 (2016), p. 17–25. Web. 12 Sept. 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jaging.2015.12.006.
• Kellehear, Allan: The Inner Life of The Dying Person. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.
• McCloud, Scott: Understanding Comics. New York: Harper Perennial, 1994.
• Olson, Rebecca: Towards a Sociology of Cancer Caregiving: Time to Feel. Surrey: Ashgate, 2015.
• Pedri, Nancy, and Helene Staveley: Not Playing Around: Games in Graphic Illness Narratives. In: Literature and Medicine 36.1 (2018), p. 230-256, doi:10.1353/lm.2018.0010.

Table of Figures

• Fig. 1: Fies, Brian: Mom’s Cancer. New York: Abrams Image, 2006, p.5.
• Fig. 2: Fies, Brian: Mom’s Cancer. New York: Abrams Image, 2006, p.26.
• Fig. 3: Fies, Brian: Mom’s Cancer. New York: Abrams Image, 2006, p.33.
• Fig. 4: Fies, Brian: Mom’s Cancer. New York: Abrams Image, 2006, p.42.
• Fig. 5: Fies, Brian: Mom’s Cancer. New York: Abrams Image, 2006, p.110. Abb. 1: Abb. 1: JFM, S. 94, 95.

• 1]   Although I do not analyze my personal experiences in this paper, I need to disclose here that my spouse and I have been time-sovereign caregivers for my father-in-law, who passed away from lung cancer, seventeen months after the diagnosis and subsequent treatment. 
• 2]   I am grateful to the organizers and the other presenters at the 2020 Berlin »CorpoRealities« conference, especially to Susan Merrill Squier and Nancy Pedri, for their comments on my presentation, which helped me in sharpening and developing my ideas for this paper. 
• 3]   The game motif can be traced in other graphic memoirs like Miriam Engelberg's Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person (2006) and Marisa Acocella Marchetto's Cancer Vixen (2006) (see Pedri/Staveley). 
• 4]   I have borrowed the concept of ›chrononormativity‹ from Elizabeth Freeman’s work on temporal (and sexual) dissonance. 
• 5]   It is interesting to compare the differences between Fies’ and Gore’s community of carers. Fies shares caregiving responsibilities in a relatively stable, structured way with his sisters, but sharing such responsibilities puts stress on their relations. On the other hand, Gore alone is in charge of caregiving decisions, and, although she has to enlist the voluntary but ad hoc help of others, including her sister, in care work (as we shall see later in this chapter), no friction develops because they are subsidiary to her in the carer hierarchy. Whereas, with Fies, stress arises because of divided opinions among the regular familial caregivers, Gore is stressed because there is no family member she can stably divide caregiving work with. 
• 6]   Gore’s mother’s stubbornly resistant cancer arc, which defies ›normal‹ expectations of deterioration, is reminiscent of a similar trajectory seen in Roz Chast’s graphic memoir of caregiving for her aging and ailing parents, Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant? Chast’s mother also, while in hospice care, shifted from looking »as if her decline had, once again, begun in earnest« to looking »disconcertingly sturdy,« confounding the expectations of the caregivers by »existing in a state of suspended animation« where »she was not living and not dying« (Chast, 198–199). Interestingly, both Gore’s and Chast’s mothers share similar personality traits – both are strong, authoritative women with robust appetites and a habit of arguing down their daughters.