Green Bay native gets to the heart of loss
Radtke sees mostly ruins in visual memoir
As a child, Kristen Radtke asked her beloved uncle Dan for a clearer explanation of the heart condition that he (and other family members) had inherited. “It’s just like love,” he told her. “You can’t see it, but it exists.”
Years later, as she struggles to understand and accept Dan’s unexpected death, what Radtke mostly sees are ruins, starting with a factory in Gary, Ind.
During a visit to Italy, she thinks about her obsessive quest: “Since Gary, I’d been consumed by the question of how something that is can become very suddenly something that isn’t …”
In her graphic memoir “Imagine Wanting Only This,” Green Bay native Radtke grapples with loss, collapse and impermanence. Her book has attracted national attention, and for good reasons. She’s both a strong writer and an adept, fluid artist. She has a word lover’s eye for found text on jars, postcards, documents, websites, hand-lettering them into her art. Unexpectedly, she also incorporates a few photographs into her panels.
Whether financially or artistically based, Radtke’s decision to use grayscale images was a wise one. The somber palette lends suitable gravitas to this elegiac story.
Dan suffered from dilated cardiomyopathy, a form of disease in which the weakening heart cannot pump blood adequately. While his physical heart may have been declining, his emotional one irradiated young Kristen with love. For a school project, she interviewed Dan as the person she admired most. Years later, she listens to the recording she made. “I was a dishwasher before I became a firefighter,” he tells her disarmingly. “You gotta start somewhere.”
“I guess the thing I want most in the future is to have a little girl like you someday. Or maybe twins!” (He went on to father two boys before his death.)
His big statement to his niece? “Believe what you know and not what anyone says you should.” It would take some time for Kristen to accept what she knew about his death.
Her first ruins excursion was to Gary, where she and her art-school boyfriend explore the remains of an abandoned cathedral. Amid the rubble she finds, and keeps, moldsmeared photographs. But later she learns they were taken by a photographer who died after being struck by a train in the area. The rotting photographs haunt and preoccupy her, but she neither returns them to the cathedral nor throws them away. She even drags them to Italy with her. Radtke scours the internet for information about the photographer, but doesn’t seek out living people who knew him.
Her restlessness has a detrimental effect on her romantic relationship with Andrew that she doesn’t immediately grasp. “I was young enough to think there was no such thing as an irreparable choice,” she admits.
Radtke travels through Asia with a friend, visiting ancient Angkor Wat, the killing fields museum of Phnom Penh and other ruined places. Later she goes to Iceland, preoccupied with the story of an Icelandic island half covered with lava after a volcanic eruption.
In a remarkable digression, Radtke relates the story of her ancestor Adele Briese, who experienced several Marian apparitions in northeastern Wisconsin, beginning in 1859. In 1871, the horrific Peshtigo fire destroys everything for acres and acres — except, apparently, the church where Briese was praying. Unfortunately, further research leads Radtke to disturbing thoughts about what weapons makers learned about creating firestorms from the Peshtigo incident.
In her story, Radtke sometimes presents other people, including Dan’s family, as moving forward from loss while she cannot. By this book’s end, I wouldn’t say she has moved on, but she started to accept impermanence and our inability to grasp what we will leave behind and to whom it might matter.