Seven Assignments
Counting Bones: anatomy of love lost & found
(memoir)
1. Story Statement:
On my 24th birthday, I had everything I ever wanted. Climbing mountains and sea kayaking with my soul mate of four years, I looked forward to starting medical school that fall - life couldn’t get better. Eight weeks later, August 3, 1986, an avalanche on Mount Baker Washington buried my first love Ian Kraabel and a companion, just a few weeks before the start of gross anatomy, the dissection of cadavers, as my first course. Death was suddenly all around me. Spinning from grief, and faced with the insurmountable challenge of medical school, I had no choice but to forge on. Counting Bones captures the abandon of first love, the depths of loss, and the rigors of medical training across a backdrop of natural beauty from the Cascade Mountains to cliffs and rivers of Minnesota to the Canadian Rockies.
2. Antagonist(s) in 200 words or less:
Counting Bones has three main antagonists. First grief who I develop as a character named Mabel, second is an unrelenting systemically abusive medical training, third the narcissist named Dick with whom I had my first relationship post-avalanche.
Lesser antagonists include loving, sometimes misguided, parents, and generations of misogyny that railed against my love of exercise and career aspirations (I’m haunted by 1970s Enjoli commericials https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4X4MwbVf5OA), and my ever present inner critic/imposter syndrome.
Societial and medical school goals are to protect the status quo, ignore suffering, and prevent change in behaviors of women and students; both systems span centuries, celebrate tradition, and instill beliefs that there is no other way to grieve or to learn; society and medical training administration’s reaction at the time was to shuffle things under the rug or suggest grievers were candidates for the “funny farm”. The goal of narcissist Dick was to love bomb me to hook me, then to destroy/defame me, then move on to his next conquest. The lesser antagonists are less malicious but more insidious.
So whatever your challenges are, be kind to your younger self– be nice to yourself in general. After all, I and you are doing the best we can at any given moment.
4. Comparables: Counting Bones is if Wild & The Year of Magical Thinking met Complications.
5. Logline:
The death of her fist love in an avalanche on Mount Baker crushes a young woman with grief just as she starts her harsh medical school training weeks later – a combination that threatens to destroy her life and career.
6. Inner conflict and secondary conflict.
Pummelled by the sudden death of my intimate partner in an avalanche that garnered national media coverage, starting medical school weeks later, and the discovery of his body mid-way through first term which included dissecting cadavers was the emotional equivalent of having my skin peeled off and being tossed into boiling water. All the while my family and medical school administration was telling me to just move on. There were many days that I did not think I would make it.
Secondary conflict was my relationship with a toxic narcissist that started the following year. Narcissists smell empathy and emotional damage the way wolves smell blood; discarded by him for another after a few years, I was able to use my grief experience to put myself back together again.
There are layers of conflict both internal and external that span this story arc.
7. Setting:
Counting Bones starts in the pastoral town of Northfield MN – “cows colleges and contentment”, then moves to the cliffs and mountains of the Cascade Range in Washington State where the avalanche on Mount Baker took Ian Kraabel’s life in 1986. I was on the mountain that day. Within weeks I am standing in a room full of cadavers in gross anatomy.
Nature is another character in my story as I embrace winter snow, lovely rivers, and later the Rocky Mountains of Western Canada and the Northern Lights over Ghost Lake. I take a trip back in time to a six week wilderness trip in the tundra of the Northwest territories, where I travelled 625 miles on the Kazan River in what is now Nunavut – we saw a massive caribou migration, but no other humans for a month. Running, skiing, climibing, hiking, canoing, and climbing in beautiful natural settings is the backbone of this story.
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Seven Assignments
Counting Bones: anatomy of love lost & found
(memoir)
1. Story Statement:
On my 24th birthday, I had everything I ever wanted. Climbing mountains and sea kayaking with my soul mate of four years, I looked forward to starting medical school that fall - life couldn’t get better. Eight weeks later, August 3, 1986, an avalanche on Mount Baker Washington buried my first love Ian Kraabel and a companion, just a few weeks before the start of gross anatomy, the dissection of cadavers, as my first course. Death was suddenly all around me. Spinning from grief, and faced with the insurmountable challenge of medical school, I had no choice but to forge on. Counting Bones captures the abandon of first love, the depths of loss, and the rigors of medical training across a backdrop of natural beauty from the Cascade Mountains to cliffs and rivers of Minnesota to the Canadian Rockies.
2. Antagonist(s) in 200 words or less:
Counting Bones has three main antagonists. First grief who I develop as a character named Mabel, second is an unrelenting systemically abusive medical training, third the narcissist named Dick with whom I had my first relationship post-avalanche.
Lesser antagonists include loving, sometimes misguided, parents, and generations of misogyny that railed against my love of exercise and career aspirations (I’m haunted by 1970s Enjoli commericials https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4X4MwbVf5OA), and my ever present inner critic/imposter syndrome.
Societial and medical school goals are to protect the status quo, ignore suffering, and prevent change in behaviors of women and students; both systems span centuries, celebrate tradition, and instill beliefs that there is no other way to grieve or to learn; society and medical training administration’s reaction at the time was to shuffle things under the rug or suggest grievers were candidates for the “funny farm”. The goal of narcissist Dick was to love bomb me to hook me, then to destroy/defame me, then move on to his next conquest. The lesser antagonists are less malicious but more insidious.
So whatever your challenges are, be kind to your younger self– be nice to yourself in general. After all, I and you are doing the best we can at any given moment.
3. Breakout titles:
Counting Bones
Unburied
Lovely Grief
Grey's & Grief
4. Comparables: Counting Bones is if Wild & The Year of Magical Thinking met Complications.
5. Logline:
The death of her fist love in an avalanche on Mount Baker crushes a young woman with grief just as she starts her harsh medical school training weeks later – a combination that threatens to destroy her life and career.
6. Inner conflict and secondary conflict.
Pummelled by the sudden death of my intimate partner in an avalanche that garnered national media coverage, starting medical school weeks later, and the discovery of his body mid-way through first term which included dissecting cadavers was the emotional equivalent of having my skin peeled off and being tossed into boiling water. All the while my family and medical school administration was telling me to just move on. There were many days that I did not think I would make it.
Secondary conflict was my relationship with a toxic narcissist that started the following year. Narcissists smell empathy and emotional damage the way wolves smell blood; discarded by him for another after a few years, I was able to use my grief experience to put myself back together again.
There are layers of conflict both internal and external that span this story arc.
7. Setting:
Counting Bones starts in the pastoral town of Northfield MN – “cows colleges and contentment”, then moves to the cliffs and mountains of the Cascade Range in Washington State where the avalanche on Mount Baker took Ian Kraabel’s life in 1986. I was on the mountain that day. Within weeks I am standing in a room full of cadavers in gross anatomy.
Nature is another character in my story as I embrace winter snow, lovely rivers, and later the Rocky Mountains of Western Canada and the Northern Lights over Ghost Lake. I take a trip back in time to a six week wilderness trip in the tundra of the Northwest territories, where I travelled 625 miles on the Kazan River in what is now Nunavut – we saw a massive caribou migration, but no other humans for a month. Running, skiing, climibing, hiking, canoing, and climbing in beautiful natural settings is the backbone of this story.
7shortassignments.docx