Against the Dying of the Light - Gisella Orkin
Against the Dying of the Light by JENNA ORKIN (First published in Counterpunch) Facebook Twitter Reddit Email My mother, Gisella Orkin, did not go gentle into that good night. There weren’t many things she did do gently; caring for her babies was about it, although she could also melt in the presence of a stranger’s suffering. We once attended a party where she spent the better part of the evening talking to a stroke-afflicted guest whom everyone else politely ignored. But more often, she was a force to be reckoned with as few people, even her closest friends, understood. Her family, however, understood it all too well. The first decade of her marriage to my father, Harvey, was punctuated by explosions, accusations fired from both sides, (they were well-matched in this regard,) the scene invariably culminating in a door slam which left both her and me quaking and wondering if he’d ever come back. But ten years into this Strindbergian danse macabre, we all moved to