Polar Vortex: A Family Memoir (2024)

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Denise Dorrance’s Polar Vortex earns its title from the brutal record-breaking “cold wave” that devastated parts of the Midwestern United States and Canada back in 2019, including the lowest-ever recorded temperature in Iowa, which the events here take place. It tells the story of a woman living abroad who suddenly finds herself in charge of caring for her ailing nonagenarian mother.

In a way, weather itself becomes an apt metaphor for how often many of us feel trapped by circumstances beyond our control. But also in such dire situations there’s little one can do except to hunker down and make the best of the situation you’ve been dealt. And learning to accept that, sometimes, even the most prepared of us are never truly prepared for what we know is coming.

Born in Iowa but now living and working across the pond, Denise has been in the UK so long her accent has gone positively transatlantic (which she satirizes by visualizing herself as British royalty). 30 years in London has left her feeling like “a foreigner in both places”, never at home in either.

Startled by a troubling email from a senior service program informing her they’ve been unable to contact her mother, Denis lets them know where a spare key will let them enter the home. They find her mother lying on the floor, fracturing her pubic bone and confused about what was happening. In a panic she books a flight back to the States, returning to the home she spent half her life growing up in – and the other half growing away from.

Once there she discovers just how far her mother’s mental health has deteriorated, that she’s now suffering from dementia and cannot live on her own anymore. From here we follow Denise as she attempts to navigate not just her mother’s pressing healthcare needs, but putting her own life in context as she assumes the parental role her mother once occupied.

What makes Dorrance’s telling so refreshing is how honest it is. Rather that devolve into a polemic about the American healthcare system (or worse, disparities between US and English healthcare) she never allows the narrative to devolve into becoming overly judgemental, letting readers experience what she experienced while it was happening, at the same time not afraid to leave room for self-criticism and introspection.

Not that anyone would blame her, given the confounding nature of medical insurance, both Federal (Medicare) and State (Medicaid), the silliness of medical alert devices that are mostly performative, or insurance companies and their endless list of disqualifying clauses. We relate to Denise becoming frustrated trying to navigate these systems because we’ve all been there, or soon will be. Most tragic is how often we mistake “learning” a broken system with exhaustion, anything to be done with the whole mess.

She also doesn’t shy away from her own shortcomings. When Denise arrives in Cedar Rapids she’s woefully unprepared for the climate, polar vortex or not, and needs to do a little shopping before she freezes to death. Her initial reaction to ‘coming home’ is tainted by an air of superiority, judging everything from grocery aisles to Starbucks. Has she become too good for Iowa? We learn her mother’s safety net was full of holes, that her estrangement from her sister (their mother’s only living relative) meant no emergency protocol was in place. Was there any estate planning? We’re never told, but I suspect the answer is no.

None of this should have come as a surprise, and yet…As much as we’d love to rage and blame “the system” we assumed would take care of us – surely all those taxes paid were for something – at some point personal responsibility over not just ourselves but for those we love asserts itself and the reality of what is (not what is not) sets in. It’s enough to make anyone feel scared and alone.

A cartoonist best-known (outside the US) for her comic strip about a more cosmopolitan chic fashionista, Mimi, Denise Dorrance expands her visual landscape considerably with her debut graphic novel. Aside from her slender drawings she also includes illustrations, postcards, reproductions, and even family photos to build not just a visual history of her mother but of their family life, both of the living and the dead. One moment a discussion about her mother’s living arrangements are rendered as the game show “Let’s Make A Deal”, the next all we see is a closeup of her mother’s terrified face. This is a beautiful book, sometimes achingly so.

She has a gift for visualizing specific emotions, and for knowing when to inject levity into scenes that would have been moribound otherwise. Nowhere is this more apparent than with how the voice inside her head presents as the looming presence of Death itself, black cloak and everything. Rather than portray the Grim Reaper as monstrous, however, she quickly forms a bond with a specter that can be described as the metaphorical manifestation of the inevitable. When Denise looks into mirrors she sees her mother staring back, a bleak reminder that time will soon march on for her as well. There is no prejudice, no malice; Death comes for us all, eventually.

At times both heartbreaking and hilarious, Denise Dorrance delicately balances both sides of an unplanned reversal of responsibility in Polar Vortex, respectfully navigating both sides of the emotional rollercoaster of a woman coming to terms not just with the mortality of her mother, but her own. I suspect the story it tells will become increasingly familiar, in any medium, as the dissolution of the close-knit family unit continues, both geographically and familially. If that isn’t depressing, I don’t know what is.