Life Support

“Life Support exemplifies the genre of graphic medicine. Spare and raw, we are thrust into the physicality of health and illness, bodies and fluids, as well as emotions deep and intense. She offers us feelings, ugly and unrepentant at times, with moments of grace at others, and in the process of the work, reveals a healing balm, years in the making.”

—Joel L. Kushner, Director, Kalsman Institute on Judaism and Health

“As she attended to her mother’s declining days, Judith Margolis instinctively, deeply recorded them in art and text that have the quality of prayer. One sees in this work the profound tenderness of attention. From within the great hollow of loss, this book offers unexpected comfort. Margolis lifts up an art and practice that attend to the ineffable, and in whose spirit loss becomes presence.”

—Elizabeth Robinson, author of On Ghosts

“In charting her ‘trajectory from brokenness to wholeness’ through drawing and writing, Margolis offers a uniquely consoling but also affirmative narrative of love and loss.”

—Lois Perelson-Gross Graphic Medicine

“Margolis’s brief book tackles a hard subject by facing the unpretty reality head-on, giving the reader a window into a world usually whispered about in hushed tones, if at all. Beyond being a sensitive tribute to her parents, there is much to consider for families similarly situated. The deft title Life Support can be understood both as the physical machinery used in critical care and as the act of the book’s creation serving as an emotional life preserver buoying the book’s author, while benefiting us all.”

—Heddy Breuer Abramowitz Jerusalem Post

“Margolis, in reviving a combination of art and literature that is religious at its core, has created a deeply original and moving work.”

—Julia Stein Rain Taxi Review of Books

“Life Support, a book of prayer, is a solicitation. It is an invitation to sit quietly and pay attention: to the pain of a dying mother and her grieving daughter; to the bonds of life, and grief, that all of us ultimately share, just by dint of still being here.”

—Tahneer Oksman Shofar

“Life Support reminded me that reading can be about more than words. A good book can be a fully sensory experience: The smell of the pages, the crackle of the spine, the texture of the cover, the delights of a good font or drawing. Life Support is all of that and more.”

—Susan Sered Nashim

Judith Margolis is the art editor of נשים / NASHIM, Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies and Gender Issues, cocurator of Women of the Book, an international visual Torah midrash project, and creative director of Bright Idea Books.