Life in Death

THE STORY OF GABRIELLE (118 pp.)--Catherine Gabrielson--World ($2.75).

This affecting book shows how difficult it is to break the human spirit--whether that of a little girl dying of cancer or of the mother who must watch her die. Until 1951 the Gabrielsons were a happy, quiet, literate family with two precocious children, an apartment in Manhattan and a cottage on Cape Cod. They found their fun in intellectual games and artistic hobbies, their deepest satisfactions in each other and in friends.

Their testing came in December, 1951, when nine-year-old Gabrielle, "a long-legged, sun-kissed little girl, full of lively, irrepressible spirits," went to bed with a stomachache. Slowly, the symptoms multiplied: vomiting, difficulty in breathing, sharper attacks of pain followed by extreme lassitude. The doctor thought it was a virus infection. Another doctor diagnosed infectious hepatitis. Stomach X-rays suggested that a small tumor might be to blame. Nothing to worry about, said the doctors, but they advised an operation.

The surgeon found internal chaos. Cancer had already spread from the spine, invading the pancreas, the liver, the stomach. It was untreatable. Nothing could be done. Her parents' instinctive reaction was to hope that Gabrielle would die without regaining consciousness. But the child lived for three long, crucifying months, and her mother writes: "What I discovered later is that life, every minute of it, is beautiful and precious and exciting always, no matter what the condition of the body."

The Pauses. The child herself was the first to learn this hard-won truth. She was determined not to surrender to the physical corruption inside her. "After all," she said, "it's only the body." In the hospital room the struggle was fought with blood transfusions, morphine injections, intravenous feeding, catheterizations. The child was wrenched with pain, grew more and more emaciated as bedsores spread across her sensitive skin, and it became increasingly difficult to find places to insert the daily needles. But there were pauses, too, when death drew back as if exhausted. There were enough of these precious moments for the creation of rituals. Each night mother and daughter watched for the flights of starlings that flooded past their window. After the starlings came the lights of the city laying a pattern of dazzle across Manhattan.

Before sleeping, all of the flowers in the room were "put to bed." and one blossom was selected to rest on Gabrielle's pillow. And there were prayers. Gabrielle had taught herself the Lord's Prayer from a book, and she repeated it each night as though actually thinking through the words. Like all children, says her mother, Gabrielle was "a natural believer with an enormous faith in God . . . I guess it's only as we grow older and become paved with pride and knowledge that we lose our understanding and begin to doubt and forget the things that once we never questioned."

The Call. Gabby was not told she had cancer, but knew it. She had courage to lend and, after one trying day, told her mother that she had looked worried, "and I don't like that. I expect you to go through all these things without breaking down." In delirium, the child cried out in a singsong voice: "The call is coming, the call is coming." It was prophetic. The convulsions began, and the bright spirit slowly burned away. Nothing was spared, for there even came a day when Gabby's blood count suddenly became normal; her liver improved; the swelling in her abdomen began shrinking. But it was a false dawn and, watching the child sleep with her fine bones showing through the silvery pallor of her face, the mother thought: "I could sometimes see the unfamiliar but strangely beautiful mask of death already being tried on."

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