The Moonlight Sonata at the Mayo Clinic
Life-changing moments take place on seemingly ordinary days when we least expect it. That is one of the many lessons writer Gallagher (Practicing Resurrection, 2003) shares in this compelling memoir of the time she spent in what she calls the Land of Oz. Not the fantastical place that sprung from the imagination of L. Frank Baum but rather the place where the sick reside. When her doctor finds something amiss during a routine eye examination, she begins a long journey on a difficult yellow-brick road. Gallagher’s memoir is about many things: illness, mortality, faith and doubt, work, busyness, navigating through the crazy quilt that is the American health-care system, and, ultimately, about regaining one’s health and one’s place in the universe. Most of all, it is the memoir of a writer’s life (“Books were to my family’s house like beds and stoves, the most basic items, necessary for survival”) and the fear of losing one of the most precious tools of not only of the literary realm but of life itself: the gift of sight. --June Sawyers