After Lula Mae Died

by Kathryn Allen Rabuzzi

On Election Day, 2016. eighty-year-old, Lula Mae Beecher, lifelong resident of small town Fens, New York, drops dead in her doctor's office just as he's assuring her she's in good health. Chaos results when her body, strapped to a gurney, is removed through the full waiting room of patients scheduled for their own appointments. Two of these gasping individuals plus four others, all closely interact as the chaos initiated by Lula Mae's singular manner of death exponentially escalates. The reader is led through a series of dissimilar, but startling, existential crises that bubble up in each of their lives in the wake of this unexpected demise.The six major characters include Lula Mae's caretaker and supposed cousin, Grace; her physician, Dr. Caleb Simmons and his wife Robie; her her pastor, Latham Larkin; her childhood best friend, Giffie Higbee; and her sole direct survivor, Candace Haynes Bruni. Major themes include tragedy triggered by thwarted expectations; reproach for amends never made; searching for authentic selfhood; and, most significantly, the disturbing effects of 'good' intentions meant to preserve a mythologized heritage for a member of Gen X.

119 pages, Paperback

Published February 21, 2020

About the author

Kathryn Rabuzzi, a retired academic in Syracuse, New York, is the author of three academic books, The Sacred and the Feminine, Motherself, Mother with Child, as well as being a founding editor of the journal, Literature and Medicine. Now fulfilling a lifetime dream, she is launching her first memoir, Rotting Floorboards and Debut Dreams: Tripping through Childhood before LSD.