“From Stage to Survival: Kathleen Watt’s Poignant Journey Through Cancer and Redemption in ‘Rearranged'”
My favorite parts of Rearranged are where Watt uses her full command of music, art, and literature to describe common illness experiences. When she is leaving the hospital after many weeks in the ICU then step-down unit, she is surprised at being met with the utter mundanity of life. “I thought of Dutch master Pieter Breughel’s Landscape with Fall of Icarus — a sweeping sixteenth century genre painting, dominated by a sturdy peasant plowing a high field. We look past him out to sea, over cliffs and sailing ships, to a pale horizon. Below the plowman, a shepherd. On the rocks amidst his flocks, props himself lazily upon his staff. At water’s edge, an angler sits beside his bait pail. The only sign of the fallen “Icarus” of the title are his tiny legs, white and flailing, disappearing beneath the waves. No one even notices.”
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