Showcase: The Still Point by Anuradha
- Archaeolibrarian
- 8 hours ago
- 2 min read
In the stark, pulse-quickening silence of an ICU, an accomplished doctor, once fluent in the language of healing and certainty, finds herself shattered. The patient is her son. One catastrophic phone call cleaves her identity in two: no longer the physician, she becomes the helpless mother, watching the rhythms of machines replace the voice of the boy she loves.
The Still Point is a lyrical memoir of love, loss, and the quiet reconstruction of a life unraveled. When her youngest son is plunged into a coma and emerges into a silent world of profound disability, the author must relinquish the clinical logic of her profession and learn a new language of caregiving: minute gestures, whispered hope, and victories measured in blinks and faint smiles.
As she fights for her son’s life, she also confronts parallel griefs: a distant father awaiting connection, a mother who arrived too late with tenderness, siblings who choose absence, and a partner who withdraws behind financial offerings instead of emotional presence. Isolated but unwavering, she becomes both fortress and sanctuary, navigating the brutal terrain of devotion, grief, and endurance.
With poetic precision and unflinching honesty, The Still Point explores the anatomy of grief, the paradox of caring for both a child who will never age in the same way and an aging parent slipping into solitude. It is not a memoir of triumph, but of transformation, an invitation to witness what remains when life is irrevocably changed.
For readers of Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air and Michele Harper’s The Beauty in Breaking, this memoir offers both medical insight and emotional truth. It is a meditation on resilience, grace, and the fierce, quiet power of love to hold a shattered world together.
Dr. Anuradha is a physician, caregiver, and writer whose life has spanned the charged intensity of critical care medicine and the intimate, unseen labor of full-time caregiving. As an intensivist, she lived among the sharp rhythms of the ICU until her son’s sudden illness pulled her into years of silent watchfulness, devotion, and grief. Her journey was later compounded by caring for her aging father, deepening her understanding of what it means to endure, to love, and to let go.
Her debut memoir, The Still Point bridges the clinical and the deeply personal. With prose that is both spare and lyrical, she offers readers a rare lens into the complexities of caregiving and the resilience of the human spirit. Her writing does not seek to diagnose or resolve; it bears witness, with clarity, tenderness, and a haunting emotional depth that lingers beyond the final page.
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