Comparative analysis of Lamb's "The Grandmother's Door" and "No Roses

¶ … Dipo

The purpose of literature is to engage the reader with the characters of a piece and to make the audience feel the emotion of a given situation. Both Beverly Dipo's "No Rainbows, No Roses" and Andrew Lam's "They Shut the Door on my Grandmother" are about narrators who witness impending death. The characters observe women who are close to death and relate to the reader how what they see makes them feel about life and their own eventual demise. Each narrator is distanced from the dying woman either through occupation or culture, but this separation is completely dissolved by the end of the story.

In Dipo's story, a nurse watches a sick patient. In her capacity as a nurse, she sees death all the time. She tries to save lives but is often unable to prevent their deaths. It is simply the nature of her profession. Before the narrator even meets Mrs. Trane, she goes into the relationship knowing that the old woman will die. "I have never seen Mrs. Trane before, but I know by the report I received from the previous shift that tonight she will die. Making my rounds, I go from room to room, checking other patients first and saving Mrs. Trane for last, not to avoid her but because she will require the most time to care for" (Dipo 42). This opening shows exactly the attitude that the narrator feels. Death is a part of her job as is exemplified by her "detached, medical routineness" (42). This completely changes in a matter of moments shared between the two women.

In her professional capacity, the nurse is forced to sit with the dying woman while she slowly gives in to death. At first the narrator wonders if Mrs. Trane had no family because there were no flowers or drawings on the walls, as the title of the story indicates. Mrs. Trane informs the nurse that she had sent her family home, sensing that they would not be able to handle the moment of death. Instead, Mrs. Trane reserves that for the nurse who, as a professional, should be used to death. This is how the nurse felt herself when she went on duty that night. However, sitting in the dark with Mrs. Trane she experiences a moment that will change her forever. "Our eyes meet and somehow, together, we become aware that this is a special moment between us, a moment when two human beings are so close we feel as if our souls touch" (Dipo 44). Mrs. Trane has died and the narrator is forever altered by the faith and internal strength of the frail woman.

In Lam's story, there is a similar theme of impending death and a narrator who is changed because of his observations. The narrator has been raised in the United States but his father and grandmother remember Vietnam during the war years and cling to the cultures they left behind. However, when the grandmother has a stroke, the father is forced to put her into a retirement home. This causes a feeling of guilt because in the old country, the grandmother would have been taken care of by the family in their home. He feels that not only has he abandoned his mother, but his heritage as well.

In this nursing home, the staff will quickly shut the door of any resident who has passed away, sparing the other residents of the home from seeing the corpse and preventing them from reflecting on their own coming deaths. For grandmother, "the series of doors being slammed shut reminds her of firecrackers during Tet" (Lam). Grandmother connects these negative moments with celebration in her home country, but it also indicated that the doors are slammed frequently in this convalescent home. "Living in Vietnam, we used to stare death in the face. Though the fear of death and dying is a universal one, the Vietnamese do not hide from it" (Lam). For Grandmother, she equates death with celebration, holding on to the traditions of her homeland. For the nursing staff, death must be secreted away, showing the American sense of death. This indicated the clash of cultures at play.