My Mother Joins the Resistance, Richard Harrison
Wolsak & Wynn, 2026
Richard Harrison’s My Mother Joins the Resistance is a meditation on love and life and death and grief. Through the poems in this collection, Harrison processes his mother’s life and the death by medical assistance in dying (MAID), which she chose as an alternative to terminal lung cancer in 2017, and to which Harrison and his brother were witnesses.
In the 12 days leading up to her death, Harrison and his brother took care of their mother and talked with her continually. She partook of “Twelve Last Suppers” growing stronger in her last days of life:
“having lived on the most meagre of meals for years
to keep her body thin and cancer-free,
and the irony of it was, it was the inoperable cancer
that came on anyway that let her find again
a child’s innocence with food.”
And,
“[i]n the garden where we fattened the sparrows,
she set down the final version of her life,
story by story,
until she was satisfied its meaning was clear.”
In his introduction, Harrison offers two paragraphs titled simply 1939 and 2017. In 1939, Doreen Howard was one of the children packed off to the British countryside in Operation Pied Piper, which was famously fictionalized in C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. In 2017, Harrison and his brother shared those final 12 days with their mother.
The first few poems speak of observation, of family and memory and love, of the excavation of the past and how we see our lost loved ones everywhere, in a “fragment of tusk”, “a small, dried hand”. These poems frame the work of the collection.
Harrison then turns that lens on “A Photograph of Doreen Elizabeth Howard, Six Years Old, in 1934” in which he
“… find[s] that face that was yours before
that man used you as if you had no being of your own.
But in your final minute in a hospital bed
I saw her face return to yours
and look on life again, at last,
weightless and without sorrow.”
Doreen was a long-distance swimmer who “trained to take on the Channel”, despised Churchill, the hero of WWII, who subsequently “sent bayonets against picket lines / and the working class she was born to”.
Unable to find a home in America which upheld the myth of Churchill, she moved to Canada with its then socialist leanings, met and married Ralph Harrison, himself fresh out of the British army.
She had also been betrayed and abused by the person who was supposed to be her caregiver during Operation Pied Piper. She was institutionalized when Harrison was nine, having held the secret of her abuse too long. Afterward, “for years she kept trying to make us understand / the ache she could not ease by telling the truth alone.”
In the end, Doreen was a woman who announced, smiling, “I’ll be dead by the end of the week” to a young teller at the bank. Having signed her MAID agreement days before, she’s there to pass on to her son “the treasure and secrets / of her material life” contained in her safety deposit box. She was a woman who recited poems memorized in her youth but never spoken until she was on the road to her chosen death.
There are also family dogs, superheroes, Father (and Father’s ghost), brother, gardening, nature, archaeology, the pandemic, Saint Peter, and poems for family and the doctor who administered the final injection.
In the title poem, Doreen, waiting for the doctor who will deliver her death, declares of hurricane Cindy, “When it pours down on the White House, that’s me pissing on Trump!” What a glorious woman!
The whole collection delivers surprising hope and humour out of the darkest events. I adored every page.
Melanie Marttila (she/her) is an #ActuallyAutistic author-in-progress, writing poetry and tales of hope in the face of adversity. Her poetry has appeared in The /tƐmz/ Review, Polar Starlight, Sulphur, and her debut poetry collection, The Art of Floating, was published in 2024 by Latitude 46. Her short fiction has appeared in SuperCanucks, Through the Portal, and Pulp Literature. She is a settler writing in Sudbury, or ‘N’Swakamok, on Robinson-Huron Treaty territory, home of the Atikameksheng Anishnawbek and the Wahnapitae First Nation, in the house where three generations of her family have lived, on the street that bears her surname, with her spouse and their dog, Torvi.
