Books & Audiobooks
In 2015, near the start of Canada’s opioid crisis, Arizona O’Neill’s father became brain dead after a fentanyl overdose. Amidst her initial shock and grief, medical professionals quickly urged her to donate his organs and recast him as a hero. Distraught, she made a decision that will haunt her for the rest of her life.
O’Neill’s debut graphic memoir, Opioids & Organs presents a profoundly personal encounter with grief and organ donation that set her on a journey to come to terms with her father’s death. Along the way, she uncovered inconvenient truths that cement a feeling that she couldn’t shake: the Canadian medical industry has no real incentive to curb the opioid crisis because overdose deaths offer a substantial supply of organs available for transplant. Throughout the book, she confronts this idea and uncovers a long history of medical institutions taking advantage of society’s outcasts.
The story opens with Arizona receiving a letter and family photo from the recipient of her father’s heart. While her friends encourage her to see this as “something good” coming from his death, Arizona’s grief and rage are palpable, along with her guilt that she “[gave] his organs back to a society that does not care about addicts” (p.62) while benefiting those suffering from more “acceptable” illnesses.
Arizona’s emotional journey is accompanied by research expeditions where she is accompanied by a snarky lizard symbolic of her “anxieties…obsessions…compulsions” (p.92) and Frankenstein’s monster, a melancholy representation of her vulnerabilities and physical reminder of human fascination in piecing together, (re)creating, and prolonging life.
At Montreal’s Maude Abbott Medical Museum, she considers the people whose organs are now on display. In Dublin, research with her mother at Marsh’s library illuminates gruesome experiments undertaken by Vladimir Demikov, the “father” of heart transplant surgeries. At Harvard Medical School, she contemplates the American slave cadaver trade and systemic inequities and ethically questionable decisions that made way for the United States’ first heart transplant. Finally, in an attempt to confront death and seek peace with mortality and embodied existences, she journeys to the Parisian catacombs.
The book may look daunting from the outside, but I found myself getting lost in the detailed and at times surreal illustrations that balance grisly realities with a soft palette and elegant touch. The intricately woven blend of memoir and history provides a welcoming foundation for the gruesome and at times disturbing topics. Instead of being overwhelmed with facts, arguments, and gore, readers are moving alongside Arizona on her personal journey to contextualize her grief. Over the course of the book her feelings are refined into sharp critique of questions for the organ industry.
Whether you are interested in the less frequently discussed impacts of Canada’s opioid crisis, curious to understand the history of organ transplantation, fascinated by gothic body horror, or just looking for a great non-fiction comic, Opioids and Organs will give you plenty to think about.