Shards of Ice: Antarctica – Death Survival Grief
Shards of Ice is about Antarctica and the death of my husband and grief. It is written in fragments, and interweaves sections about my trips to Antarctica – the first was soon after my husband died – and stories of the early explorers, in the form of snapshots rather than linear history.
There is a section on the Red Desert, central Australia, another spiritual home of mine, contrasting with the southern white desert. And a lot about the four years of my husband’s decline. And death. And grief.
This book joins a growing literature that entwines the experiences of illness, dying and bereavement with a meditation on Place – a quite unusual place in this case- and its less well-known history. Terry Tempest Williams’ REFUGE and Peter Mathieson’s SNOW LEOPARD come to mind, as well as everything by Pico Iyer. My book obviously finds echoes as well in the recent best-selling memoirs by Joan Didion and Joyce Carol Oates.
It is my journey to the discovery of Antarctica, into Aboriginal Australia, and into death and back into life, into myself.
Minnie Biggs’s Shards is a love story as well as a death story, and some will weep at both. Biggs is able to be raw without wallowing. This is a tough path to follow, but she does it. The honesty is magnetic.
Biggs’s reflections on life after love are penetrating to the bone. She handles the bereaved one’s paradox of grief-and-relief beautifully. She does so in a way that is also slightly shocking in its truth. And then there are the open glades of lightness. This is not a self-help text in griefology.
Biggs also writes with word-surprises always just around the corner. She pushes the language to meanings beyond the normal, making a new normal. The book is stylistically and in content so redolent of her character, it’s pure Minnie, and yet it escapes the Boomer ailment of self-fascination. It is her reflection not her projection.
The book is both a diarist’s record and a storyteller’s tale. The way she interweaves Stephen’s dying, the Antarctic, and the Australian Red Centre, is brilliant. It gives the book internal contrasts that let it have three alternating faces in one. Biggs likes to keep her readers always fresh.
This book is finely crafted and just as finely felt. The light and dark patches ramp up and down orchestrally like a mighty Wurlitzer organ. She has mastered the wedding of form and feeling.
Biggs’s book has a long-waiting readership. It is one that is growing daily as Boomers increasingly leave their partners in death, and, in doing so, leave those remaining behind with even more reason for wondering about the terms of life.
Peter Sutton FASSA
School of Biological Sciences, University of Adelaide
Division of Humanities, South Australian Museum
Author of Politics Of Suffering