| | Definition: | | Vigil
In the summer of 1995, Alan Shapiro`s sister, Beth, died from breast cancer. She spent the last four weeks of her life in a hospice room, devotedly attended by her parents, her brothers, her husband, and daughter. Vigil is the story of those four weeks - of a family struggling to come to terms with catastrophic illness, to understand the process of dying, and, in those trying moments, to reconcile their shared and often scarred histories. Shapiro`s narrative allows those histories to emerge naturally, spontaneously, as the family gathers at Beth`s bedside. Their words, their actions, and their remembrances gradually intimate a familial past sadly distanced and alienated, in which Beth`s social and political convictions and her interracial relationships, including her eventual marriage, were met with indignation, intolerance, and estrangement. Drawn together in that hospice room, confronted plainly and undeniably with Beth`s pain, the family somehow finds the strength to breach those barriers and to begin its own process of grief, healing, and renewal. more details ... |
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