LADY SUNFLOWER

A young Knoxville, Tennessee, woman chronicles living with the life-threatening brain cancer she names Gertrude.

In 2018, bright, ambitious Shuck-Sparer, then 15 and a competitive swimmer and ice skater, was diagnosed with high-risk medulloblastoma, a brain cancer that required grueling surgeries, radiation, and chemotherapy. After initially undergoing surgery and seven months of chemotherapy in Memphis, Sierra relapsed, endured another round of treatment during her senior year of high school, graduated on time, and then headed to Atlanta to attend Georgia Tech. When the Covid-19 pandemic sank her original dream of visiting Japan on a trip sponsored by the Make-a-Wish Foundation, she pivoted to using her wish to create this memoir of life with Gertrude, which she’d been chronicling on her Instagram account, kill.gertrude. This work is enlivened by wry comments on treatment protocols and practical tips for surviving them, along with Tyler’s black-and-white illustrations. Rants and laments, rhymed and studded with bitter humor, give way to plangent sorrow for a lost future, like the fallen hair on her pillow, which Shuck-Sparer captures with a lint roller: “It comes right off, as if it is dust. // Somedays I feel like I am dust, / Fighting against the wind to stay where I am.” By turns passionate, wistful, furious, heartbroken, and courageous, the author has a message for readers: “I want to put enough of myself into the world so that when I’m gone, you’ll remember me.” Mission accomplished.

Haunting.