Review: The White Lady
By Dustin Cabeal
Death! It’s coming for us all. Of if it was that easy to sum up The White Lady with just that statement. Instead, we find a complex look at how we care for our elderly. Is there kindness we can provide at the end of one’s life be it a simple gesture of pretending to be someone’s granddaughter after they begin pulling back from them. Quite frankly, I do not think anyone has the answer and there are all sorts of legal gray areas when it comes to end of someone’s life.
The story follows Estelle, a nurse at a care home for the elderly. It follows her as she becomes entangled in the lives of the people she is caring for and how as more and more time passes the harder it becomes for her to say good by to these people. She begins to feel as if she is their family or at the very least that she understands them better than their family. There is a level of empathy that Estelle achieves with each of the people in her care. It begins to unravel though as she loses more people and her compulsion to keep a memento from each person leads to her taking a Nintendo Switch and playing Animal Crossing with one her patients under the guise of it being his granddaughter. Her coworker and friend Sonia discovers this and becomes wrapped up in the events making her question if she is crossed a line because of Estelle.
While the story and pacing are well crafted, the ending is unrewarding. There is nowhere for Estelle’s character to go, we just see her unravelling, but there are no consequences to her actions. At the logical point in the story in which we would reach the consequences, the story flashes to the future in a predictable way and ends there. There is a great concept here, but there isn’t a full and complete story to go along with it. Yes, the relationships between the nurses and the elderly are touching and moving, but it feels like a collection of short stories all taking place in the same setting with the same characters.
It is a shame because you really want to see where this is going for Estelle. She is lost in the world, settling for less from her relationships outside of work and when her secret is revealed not once, but twice everyone just looks past this very serious problem of hers and try to move on as quickly as they can. It deflates the story the first time, but then there is a great build up to Sonia’s discovery. Soon after though we are deflated again as we see Sonia making a similar mistake and getting too close to the family of a patient.
What the story does well is ask the question of how do we care for our old? As a society we pay so much attention to how we care of someone at the start of their life, but not nearly as much care or thought about the end of their lives. Do some yoga once a week and watch tv before you drink your wine. Then it’s off to bed with your meds to do it all over again. Its just that it asks this question repeatedly with each new elderly character the story follows. It does not particularly try to answer that question, which is fine, but it also does not need to repeat it over and over again.
The artwork is mostly blue and white. All the linework is blue apart from water-colored pages filled with color. Otherwise, it is blue hues used as the shadowing and lines. Which is fitting considering the overall feel of the book is blue. The water-colored pages or at least it looks all water colored, is wonderful. The details are masterful, making the characters look realistic. The elderly characters look their age, saggy boobs and all. There’s nudity in a way that is normalized in the story and handled with maturity. The art brings that out and captures the emotion that Estelle and Sonia feel for the people in their care.
It is a shame that the story really went nowhere. In some sense it tries to say that we are the sum of our experiences and the people we experience them with, but that is a stretch I’m not willing to give it. Especially since I am filling in the blank for them. It’s enjoyable read, even if it is extremely melancholy. You are not going to slap your knee and say, “damn that was some good reading!” You may come away with a new appreciation for people at the end of their lives and the people we put in charge to care for them.
Quentin Zuttion
Europe Comics