Alcoholic Liver Cirrhosis

in the summer of 2008, i began a path toward reconciliationwith my deaf mother, who had been diagnosed with end-stage liver disease and a litanyof life-threatening medical complications. at age 59, a lifetime of drinking and drugabuse not only ravaged mom’s body, but in the preceding 30 years, it also robbed herof an opportunity to raise her only child. my mother’s disability contributed to astrained relationship with her hearing parents and brothers, her lack of a true languageuntil age 5, and her life-long struggle with substance abuse. yet the root cause of herinability to care for herself – or for me – wasn’t her deafness, but rather an inherentisolation brought about by her alienation from the “hearing-world.”this manuscript seeks to illuminate this world

by juxtaposing linguistic, cultural, familial,and other dimensions of the deaf-world with those more familiar to its mostly hearingaudience. this is accomplished by interrogating the grey areas of seemingly binary relationships– hearing and deaf, spoken and signed, mother and stranger, join and unjoin. by doing so,i implore the reader to question the nature of the greyness, and the rigid black and whiteabsolutes on either side. this manuscript is a reflection on my emotionaljourney and struggle to find the common thread that links me to the mother i would only beginto know in the last three years of her life. upon her liver disease diagnosis, shortlybefore my 27th birthday and after a lifetime of alienation and resentment, i begrudginglyagreed to assist with her aftercare, believing

myself to be her only remaining link to thehearing-world of doctors, hospitals and government assistance that could help prolong her life.what i unexpectedly uncovered along the way were the distilled central traits that uniteme with “mom-mom” and that allowed for a kind of reconciliation before her death.by juxtaposing our prolonged estrangement throughout my childhood with our intense closenessin her final hours of life, i hope to challenge the nature of the reader’s own essentialrelationships. my mother was a supporting actress in the story of my childhood, it seemed,only appearing to stir up old battles or explode with drunken emotions. this underscores theirony of our relationship later in life where i served in the parent role, ensuring shemade it to doctors’ appointments, ate the

right foods, paid bills on time, and remainedemotionally healthy. through the manuscript, the reader must question his or her own conceptions– or misconceptions – about the archetypes for mother and son, hearing and deaf, natureand nurture, hopeless despair and unrestrained joy.it was doris’ addiction that pushed her away from her only child and caused her untimelydeath. paradoxically, her terminal illness allowed our relationship to heal and for anunconventional mother-son connection to grow. it was her inability to stay sober for themajority of my life that forced me to look at my own demons and seek my own sobriety,sparing myself the same fate and finding redemption and meaning in her death. it was in her dyingthat i began to live.

this book journeys through two timelines inalternating chapters. the first storyline – unjoin – featureskey moments in our shared and individual lives that question conventional ideas of “mother”and “son”: drunken confessions of family secrets shared too soon, hurtful remarks passedfrom mother to daughter to son, and second chances for parents to get things right. thesestories have been taken from the first 26 years of our relationship and reveal a slowunraveling of the fabric of our family. alternating chapters in the second storyline– join – provide the rising action for the book, telling the story of the last 3years of our relationship as mom battled terminal liver disease and the consequences of herchoices. it begins as doris slips into dementia,

brought about by increased sodium and ammonialevels in her blood, just shy of the final evaluation that will place her on the organtransplant recipient list. the book offers cultural, linguistic, andhistorical insight into the deaf-world that framed our relationship and our lives. italso speaks to larger societal and cultural questions of the impacts of addiction, deafness,poverty, and illness and how these relate to the fundamental parent-child relationship.the book’s title, join/unjoin is a translation, or gloss, of the compound asl handsign “join-unjoin”which means to break a relationship or cut off ties. the title speaks to the centralquestions of the manuscript: what causes this rip in the parent-child relationship, oneof the most essential in life? can true reconciliation

be achieved after nearly three decades spentin old patterns of resentment and alienation? most importantly for me as a writer is todispatch a challenge to the reader to find his or her own answer to these question: what is total reconciliation and is it ever possible once that fabric has been ripped and so, today, i've brought some excerpts from my book. visit wwww.jesse-harris.com/projects to read these excerpts. click on the join-unjoin tab