A Nurse's Story (Criticism)

Criticism

Klay Dyer

Dyer holds a Ph.D. in English literature and has published extensively on fiction, poetry, film, and television. He is also a freelance university teacher, writer, and educational consultant. In the following essay, he explores the dynamics and politics of Mary McDonald's retrospective reading of the town of Booth's Landing.

Peter Baida's "A Nurse's Story" is written in an episodic style that accentuates the links between the remembered episodes that constitute Mary McDonald's fragmented life review. At the same time, the story illuminates the layers of stories that come from the history of a small town. Openings and closings accumulate slowly in the story, turning "A Nurse's Story" into a kind of archaeological site within which layers of memory blend together, making reading the story a process of sifting through and reordering events. In Mary's story, connections are made retrospectively through an awareness of what is to come and which aspects will assume significance and which others will not.

With its nonlinear style of storytelling, "A Nurse's Story" generates a form that is ideally suited for exploring the external and internal forces that have gathered over time to crisscross the spiritual and emotional foundations of Booth's Landing. Never really challenged by the threat of an advancing urban sprawl or by economic downturns or factory collapses, town is split instead by tensions between its history and its present, two threads that come together in the life and the story of Mary McDonald.

The story of Mary's transformation from passive Catholic nurse to confident political activist is also the story of one woman's struggle to establish connections, a word that Baida never actually uses in his story but which resonates through each episode Mary remembers. In large part, this search consists of Mary's movement toward understanding how experiences link people's lives. Like life itself, Mary's journey is uncertain, but she comes to appreciate and even celebrate the ambiguities in what she has long considered the knowable, ordinary events of the town.

At the beginning of her career, for instance, Mary was forced to deal with Clarice Hunter, a woman who is, in many ways, a mirror-image of Mary herself. World-weary, physically and emotionally exhausted, on the one hand, Clarice is, on the other, "a jewel" and "a blessing" of a nurse whose genuine humanity connects her to her patients. Clarice is especially connected to Mary's grandmother, who called for her nurse not her family to comfort her in her dying moments:

Mary called Clarice, who came to the hospital at two in the morning. At three, Mary's grandmother fell asleep with her mouth wide open. At six, with a terrifying snort, she woke and died. Clarice helped the night nurse wash the body. Then she worked the day shift.

Through her early contact with Clarice, who badgers her about her Catholic passivity and political neutrality, Mary began to sense that there are worlds and realities lying alongside the one she knows. At times, these are troubling worlds in which unanswerable questions about value and worth are asked regularly and with passion. These worlds often offer themselves as enlightening complements to the reality of Mary's life at the hospital. The world of Ida Peterson, for instance, gave Mary her first real experience with blood and with the strength of a woman determined to die with dignity. The aging Mary vividly remembers Ida's death: "She still remembers the splash of blood on her face when she stepped into Mrs. Petersen's room. She still remembers how long it took Mrs. Petersen to die."

Still other of these worlds appear to Mary (and to the reader) like objects viewed in a funhouse mirror, generally recognizable but marked by a darkened, almost surreal difference. The briefly recounted story of Laura Seybold, for instance, lingers in Mary's mind with its central image of a young woman, "the life out of her eyes," wandering "through town with a bleak, dazed, shell-shocked look on her face" as she heads home one Saturday night to swallow "every pill in the house." Or, later, the story of Eunice Barnacle's mother, who bails her abusive boyfriend out of jail so that she can murder him with a shotgun, an act that gains her both a life sentence at Sing Sing Prison and a place in town's expanding lore.

As she moves from episode to episode, Mary gradually comes to see for the first time the fissures in the peacefulness of Booth's Landing. At one extreme lies the world of the masculine and the powerful, symbolized by the omnipresence of the town's most prominent families, the Booths and Tiesslers, whose connections reach back to the Revolutionary War period. "In every generation," as Mary acknowledges, "for as long as anyone can remember, the Booths and the Tiesslers have been the town's leading families" as well as the foundations of its economic fortunes. Seen from this angle, Booth's Landing is a world of banks and factories, of civic pride and philanthropic gesture, and of football heroics that figure in local mythologies.

At the other extreme is an ever-expanding community of disenfranchised women that begins to arrange itself around the local hospital and that eventually fractures the town with its push for union certification. "For six months, the nurses carried picket signs outside the hospital," Mary recalls. "Twenty nurses, on the picket line, every day and into the night." She recalls how local residents were divided about the strike, how many of them scorned the nurses and how hard it was to persist.

Yet beneath the surface of this apparently split world, as beneath the surface of all the worlds Mary touches, circulates a rich diversity of opinions and attitudes toward love and sex, faith and religion, wisdom and knowledge. In this sense, "A Nurse's Story" is arranged as a series of questions that Mary faces: questions of love, sexuality, power, mortality, and spirituality, all of which culminate in her experience with political activism.

What Mary gradually understands is that no experience or person exists in isolation. She comes to sense the insufficiency of any of these other worlds to synthesize fully the complexities she recognizes as essential to her own sense of truth. For her, each world is incomplete and rigidly exclusive rather than cumulative and inclusive. With each new experience and story, Mary also gains understanding of the different strategies others use to organize their reality, to piece together their own memories.

The story ends with Mary sensing, but not understanding fully, the meaning in the visit of the ghostly Sister Rosa and of Mary's long-dead husband's sudden youthfulness, as he re-enters her story with "hair the color of fresh corn" and his clarinet held between "fingers as thick as cigars." She finally understands that each story she set out to tell inevitably spirals outward to include other stories told by other people. These other stories appear in various forms and stages of completion. They are allusive, metaphoric, or nostalgic. Moreover, these other stories are often contradictory, equally believable visions and revisions of a single event; the layering of stories produces what Mary herself recognizes as a system of stories circulating within and around her. Hers is a dying lived in retrospect, a journey away from the known and the knowable to the illuminating edges of open secrets and whispered pasts.

In this sense, "A Nurse's Story" is a richly patterned fiction about the need to structure subjective experiences through the complex act of fiction making. Mary's maturing corresponds with her accumulation and transcendence of storytelling. It is a story, too, in which the reader is implicated, made aware of the assumptions (cultural, historical, and ideological) that limit the way Mary reads the people and worlds around her. How the aging nurse reads the various "texts" of her existence comes to reflect on how readers approach the story of Mary's life, a reminder of people's need for clarity and order and for the meaning that comes through reading.

Source: Klay Dyer, Critical Essay on "A Nurse's Story," in Short Stories for Students, Thomson Gale, 2007.

Carol Ullmann

Ullmann is a freelance writer and editor. In the following essay, she explores the meaning of a "good death" in the context of a life well-lived and how people are remembered after they die in "A Nurse's Story."

"A Nurse's Story," by Peter Baida, reflects upon the life and death of nurse Mary McDonald, who is dying from colon cancer. Mary is content with her life and calm in the face of death; indeed she knows too much about her condition because of her training as a nurse to be mistaken about the deterioration of her body. Mary knows that everybody wants a "good death," but she is unsure what that really means. For Ida Peterson, a good death meant a "natural death," which Mrs. Peterson believed meant she would die peacefully with her husband nearby. This is not the death that Mrs. Peterson got because she actually died from a ruptured artery. Frightened, Mrs. Peterson died covered in her own blood, clutching Mary's hand, a nurse she barely knew. In the face of her own imminent death, Mary chooses instead to focus on her life, a life that was well-lived and fulfilling in its own quiet way.

Mary lived her entire life in Booth's Landing, a small town on the Hudson River in New York State. "You can do worse than to live and die in a place like Booth's Landing," and Mary indeed refuses to go with her son George to Chicago or anywhere else in her last months because she wants to die in Booth's Landing. Mary married George, a gentle man who loved to play clarinet and taught music at the local high school. They were married thirty-nine years and had three children together before George died. On their second date, Mary assured George that "there's more to life than money" after he told her that he would like to live in Booth's Landing for the rest of his life and teach clarinet. He said, "I don't think I'll ever make much money. I've never cared much about it." At the time in which "A Nurse's Story" takes place, George has been dead eight years but is never far from Mary's thoughts. She misses him deeply and remembers with affection how he was a good father to their children and passionate about playing his clarinet. Their love, like their lives, was quiet and thorough.

Mary had no hobbies. After her love for her family, the New York Giants, and dark beer, she poured all of her passion into nursing. Nursing is part technical know-how (managing medicines, operating hospital machinery, and following procedure) and part personal touch (soothing people through pain and fear, being strong for others when they are weak, and having compassion). Mary touched the lives of many people in Booth's Landing, often seeing people at their lowest moments. For example, the doctor caring for her, Dr. Tom Seybold, is the son of Laura Seybold, a patient Mary nursed after a suicide attempt following her second miscarriage, before she and her husband conceived Tom. Mary was considered by her colleagues and neighbors to be a good nurse; people called her for medical advise before they called their physician. "She knew things that only nurses know." But Mary was not the only good nurse in Booth's Landing. When Mary's grandmother was dying from colon cancer, Mary's friend Clarice Hunter was the nurse on duty. Mary's grandmother was so touched by Clarice's careful ministrations that she insisted on having Clarice at her bedside in the last hours of her life, just as if Clarice were another member of her family. "This woman is a jewel. This woman is a blessing," Mary's grandmother explained. Mary's grandmother, one could argue, also had a good death, eased by the care of an excellent nurse. Mary recognizes the ephemeral qualities of a good nurse in Eunice Barnacle, her attending nurse at Booth-Tiessler Geriatric Center.

Mary's life was, by her choice, relatively uneventful. Her participation in the 1967 nurses' union strike was her one deviation from everything the world expected of her. Mary's participation in the formation of the union in 1965 and the subsequent strike was important to the other nurses who held her opinion in high regard — "if you talked to other nurses, you found out that Mary's opinion made a difference." Baida never explains why this is, but the reader is left with the sense that Mary's steady sensibilities and skill as a nurse earned her the respect of her peers. The strike overall was a dramatic event in the history of the town: nurse Beverly Wellstone on a hunger strike lasting thirty-three days; Warren Booth Jr. and George Jr. stressed about the strife between their parents during an important high school championship football game; Sister Rosa bringing in scab nurses to cross the picket lines; striking nurses praying outside the hospital in the dead of winter; and Mary standing proudly with her coworkers despite the comments made by her neighbors. Mary, after all, had dedicated her life to caring for other people's health, and this union put her social and professional life on the line. It was a gamble, but the rewards were an investment in the well-being of the nurses and, by extension, the patients. The irony is that some people, like Carl Usher or Cheryl Hughes, were affronted at the idea of the nurses striking because they felt that patients were being neglected. Cheryl said: •Let's just hope nobody dies. Those women ought to be ashamed." These people never looked more closely at the issue and understood that the nurses were picketing, in part, to improve patient care.

What Mary and others remember about the strike is that it lasted over three months and took a stranger coming into their small town — an emissary from the cardinal — to bring the strike to conclusion. With the union officially recognized, Mary and her colleagues were able to earn a fairer wage and better staffing. In the long term, the union would also give the hospital's nurses an avenue by which they could get any other needed changes.

Mary did not regret her participation in the union, and it did not alter her conservative political and economic convictions. Eunice sees that the union is not doing much for Mary now that she is sick and dying, but Mary knows the union is important for other reasons because she urges Eunice to unionize the nurses at the Booth-Tiessler Geriatric Center. Just as Mary and Clarice once did, Eunice and her coworkers debate the possibility of a union for the Geriatric Center nurses. Just as Mary was reluctant to become a "troublemaker," so do some of Eunice's coworkers refuse to get involved. Trouble is sometimes what is needed to oust complacency. One of the defining points the nurses then and now come around on is the question of whether they are being paid what they are worth. Nurses are highly skilled and often work in intense environments, caring for multiple patients and working long shifts to ensure continuity of care. Eunice knows, as Mary long ago determined, that self-respect is worth fighting for.

Baida is illustrating how some aspects of human nature and patterns in history are continual, but they are perhaps rarely observed in their entirety by individuals caught in the midst of events. A minor era is passing with Mary's death, but the seeds of the next generation of nurses — Eunice and her burgeoning union at the Geriatric Center and Mary's daughter Jane who is an exhausted nurse and mother of two wrestling with alcoholism. Mary's son George Jr. is a reflection of his father — large, quiet, and earnest. Brad is Mary and George's wild card, the prodigy with a successful job far away from Booth's Landing. All of Mary's children come home to be with their mother when her health takes a permanent turn for the worse, and it is clear that there is real affection between her and her children. Mary is succumbing to colon cancer just like her grandmother did almost forty years earlier. She has had her entire life to prepare for the possibility of this inherited disease; the cancer is, again, inoperable and unavoidable. With the bulk of her happy life behind her, Mary takes on her impending death tranquilly.

Mary's memories of her life and the author's description of the ongoing activity in the town after her death demonstrate Baida's sense that life in a small town is like a "tightly spun" web. Everyone is connected, sometimes indirectly or invisibly. Richard Dill, former town reporter and Mary's neighbor at the Geriatric Center, watches her fade away and remembers how she cared for his wife Jennifer after surgery. After Mary dies, Warren Booth Jr. remembers her in the context of the nurses' strike which disrupted his family and his football season. He selfishly assigns blame to Mary for making him unhappy almost thirty years earlier, but his own lack of compassion is a strong contrast with Mary's personality and reflects poorly upon him. He thinks to himself, "What great enterprise had they ever managed?" The irony, of course, is that nurses deal with life and death every day whereas Warren Booth Jr. grew up in a privileged family and inherited his job from his father. "The fact that he had never managed any great enterprise did not occur to him." Roger Dill, son of Richard, who reported on the nurses' strike, doesn't remember Mary's effect on his life. He is bored and indifferent as he writes up a standard obituary for Mary, oblivious of the knowledge that Mary was the nurse who cared for his mother twenty years ago. Nick Santino, the undertaker, lovingly prepares Mary's body, cognizant of how carefully, tenderly Mary cared for his own mother when she was dying. He is sad to see that Mary has died. Sister Margaret, the current hospital administrator, remembers Mary as a "damned good nurse" — a strong compliment coming from a nun and also significant considering that Sister Margaret and Mary, as employer and employee, had their "differences."

Mary's one lingering regret as she lay dying is that she disappointed the formidable Sister Rosa, who was hospital administrator during the union strike. Mary laments: "Oh, Sister Rosa, how I admired you! How I hated doing anything that might displease you. How I wanted you to like me." Sister Rosa was strict and held everyone to a high standard. She was also extremely stubborn and held out (along with the chairman of the board Warren Booth) against the striking nurses until the cardinal intervened. In her last days Mary is visited by the deceased Sister Rosa in a vision. Sister Rosa assures Mary that she did not take the strike personally and is actually glad that it happened. Sister Rosa says: "Workers have to fight. The whole system depends on it." Reassured, Mary wakes and talks to her children one last time before slipping into unconsciousness where she is greeted by her late husband George. She has missed him so much, and the sight of him gladdens her heart. "The smile on his face made Mary want to get up and throw her arms around his neck." "A Nurse's Story" illustrates the good life that Mary lived as well as the good death she is granted, reunited with her loving husband and all regrets in life settled.

"A good death. That's what everyone wants." A good death is defined by the life that was lived, the impact he or she had, and by what people remember of that person. A good death cannot be simply defined by how or why a person is dying. Baida leaves his readers with the sense that Mary's death was a good one — despite the fact that she has suffered from colon cancer — because she has lived a happy life, has had the respect of her peers and the unconditional love of her family. In the embrace of her community, Mary does not fear death. Her compassionate care as a nurse has touched many of her neighbors, some of whom are not aware of how Mary impacted their lives, but Mary did not give of herself because she expected anything in return. Like Clarice Hunter said when caring for Mary's grandmother, "Just doing my job." Most of the people who do remember Mary's gentle strength remember her with pride, respect, and perhaps a little awe.

Source: Carol Ullmann, Critical Essay on "A Nurse's Story," in Short Stories for Students, Thomson Gale, 2007.

Jennifer Bussey

Bussey holds a master's degree in Interdisciplinary Studies and a bachelor's degree in English Literature. She is an independent writer specializing in literature. In the following essay, she considers how Peter Baida reveals the nurses' strike as the defining moment in Mary McDonald's life in "A Nurse's Story."

Peter Baida's O. Henry award-winning "A Nurse's Story" is the story of a dying nurse, Mary McDonald. Baida takes the reader on a journey through Mary's past and present. During her last three days of life, Mary is in a room in a geriatric hospital. She passes the time reflecting on the past, talking to her nurse about starting a union, and preparing herself for the death she knows is imminent. As Baida guides the reader through numerous episodes of Mary's life, the reader comes to know her — and her community — well. It soon becomes apparent that the defining moment in Mary's life was a nurses' strike in 1967, an event that forced Mary to take a stand despite creating division in her close-knit community.

Baida's narrative style is unique and effective. The short story is essentially divided into thirty-one mini-chapters, about half of which relate to Mary's past. The overall effect is realistic; Mary is fully aware she is in the last days of her life, and her mind wanders naturally from the past to the present. Her interactions with the people around her are calm and devoid of the panic or terror other patients might feel at the prospect of dying soon. Perhaps because she has been a nurse her whole adult life, Mary made her peace with death long ago. Her love for her husband is deep and abiding, and she is comforted in the knowledge that she will see him soon. But she is not one to waste away her last days of influence. She encourages her son to lose weight and take better care of himself, and she tries to convince her nurse, Eunice, to pursue a union for herself and the other geriatric nurses.

The issue of the union dominates Mary's thoughts and words during her time in the hospital. Baida makes it clear that her past involvement in a union and a subsequent strike was pivotal in Mary's life. Seventeen of the mini-chapters in the story relate directly or indirectly to Mary's union involvement. The reader gets the first taste of this when Mary is talking to Eunice about how hard nurses' work is and how little they are paid. Eunice is resistant to the idea of a union, but then, so was Mary at first. As the story unfolds, the reader understands that Mary had always been against unions until her own professional life seemed hopeless. In 1965, she and the other nurses felt overworked, underpaid, and unheard. To the surprise of her coworkers, she ultimately decided to vote for the union. Now, Eunice is the one who is reluctant to pursue a union, and Mary knows how she feels. Toward the end of the story, Eunice remembers Mary commenting that unions had their good sides and their bad sides. Unfortunately, Mary dies before Eunice has the chance to ask her about it again. Eunice thinks to herself that now, she will never know what Mary would have said. But the reader and Eunice know that Mary would have given both sides, only to conclude that unions are good for nurses. Her insistence that Eunice consider it is evidence of that. Eunice may not get the details from Mary, but her position is made clear. There is a scene in which Eunice is talking to a friend about the possibility of pursuing a union. It is reminiscent of Mary's past, when she turned from reluctance to endorsement. Eunice was opposed to the idea of a union when Mary first talked to her about it, but in this scene, she tries to convince another woman that it might be a good idea after all. Both Mary and Eunice love nursing and want to give their patients the best, which requires better working conditions.

Mary (when she was younger) and Eunice have something else in common — they need to make as much money as they can to support their families. Mary's husband was a music teacher who knew he would never make much money; Eunice is a single parent of a three-year-old. They both have practical needs to meet in their jobs, as well as personal ones. Baida tells the reader enough about Mary's past and personality that her love for nursing and nurses is undeniable. Apparently Mary had no hobbies or social groups. She loved football, beer, and nursing. In fact, she passed her love of nursing to her only daughter, who also enters the profession. This insight into Mary's heart is important because it gives significance to the way she talks to Eunice about unions and being the best nurse she can be.

When people are dying, the most significant people and events return to their thoughts. In many cases, people are plagued with guilt and regret. But in Mary's case, she lingers on her relationship to the nurses' union back in the 1960s. Why? As Baida slowly reveals, joining a union is initially contrary to Mary's nature, and her coworkers know it. Mary is also influential among her peers at the hospital, so the other nurses are interested in where she will land on the issue. When she changes her mind and decides to support the union, it is not just a hot topic among her peers, it marks a turning point for Mary. Rather than adhere to her existing views and beliefs, she takes into account how the issue particularly relates to her and her fellow nurses' work situation. She opens her mind and ultimately changes it. That the other nurses knew enough about her politics to know she would likely oppose a union demonstrates that Mary was outspoken about her views. This makes her willingness to change her mind a particularly strong indicator about the nature of her character.

Once the union was formed, it was not easy. Only two years later, the union decided to go on strike, complete with picketing and media attention. Her participation in the strike cemented Mary's commitment to the union. As a striker, she faced the disapproval and rejection of friends and other people she respected. She even had to strike the hospital owner's home, despite the fact that her son George and the owner's son were teammates on the football team. The whole union experience, then, represented a time in her life when Mary took a public stand for which she could not be universally popular in her community. It is little wonder she would reflect on this time in her final days. The memories are vivid, and they are both empowering and defeating. But her commitment to the union was really a commitment to herself and the other nurses at the hospital. Now, on her deathbed, she is in a hospital being cared for by a nurse she likes and respects. Her heart returns to that time of camaraderie, and she wants Eunice to have the ability to be the best nurse — and mother — she can be.

Mary's involvement in the strike continues to affect her life through the attitudes of other people in the community. Even now when she is sixty-nine, her association with that strike defines the way some people in the community think of her. As he reads her obituary, Warren Booth remembers little else about her than her holding a picket sign in front of his house all those years ago. Warren had been George's teammate, and when she picketed his father's house, it affected him as a teenager. He feels no sadness at her death and no real feelings of sadness for George, either. He toys with the idea of going to the funeral with a "why not?" attitude, but ultimately decides that he will just send a card to George. His lingering hostility is based solely on Mary's involvement in the strike decades ago. Similarly, Sister Margaret (who took over for Sister Rosa as the hospital's executive director) is sad to hear that Mary has died, although she hastens to add that she and Mary had their differences. Sister Margaret was not even the executive director at the time of the strike, yet her compassion for Mary is accompanied by a twinge of resentment over her union activities.

To other members of the community, however, Mary's identity as a union member is secondary to her identity as a caring and skilled nurse. At the funeral home, Mary's body is prepared by two men, one of whom is Nick Santino. Nick tells the other man that he is sad to see Mary go because he remembers how she took care of his mother in the hospital. He does not just remember that she attended to his mother's basic needs; he remembers how she washed her feet, even using a toothbrush to clean her toes. What Nick does not know is that Mary wanted to provide that level of detailed care to all her patients and that only through the met demands of the union for more staff could she provide it. Readers may recall a previous passage in which Mary and another nurse are physically and emotionally drained by having as many as twenty patients. It is fair to infer that Nick's mother was admitted to the hospital after the strike and after more staff were hired.

The ripples of the strike go out to people who do not even realize that their lives are affected by it. For some, like Warren and Sister Margaret, the effects are negative, but for countless others, like Nick, they are positive and unforgettable. If Mary had been alive to hear Nick's story, it would have only affirmed her difficult decision to commit to the nurses' union. That turning point in her life made possible the legacy she wanted as a nurse who cared for her patients in a way that mattered.

Source: Jennifer Bussey, Critical Essay on "A Nurse's Story," in Short Stories for Students, Thomson Gale, 2007.

Thomson Gale

In the following essay, the critic gives an overview of Peter Baida's work.

After earning a master's degree in business administration from the University of Pennsylvania, Peter Baida began twenty years of employment at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. At the time of his death in 1999, he led the center's fundraising operations. The business executive wrote Poor Richard's Legacy: American Business Values from Benjamin Franklin to Donald Trump, an "ingeniously conceived and brightly executed social history" according to Genevieve Stuttaford in Publishers Weekly. The 1990 publication includes figures from as early as the seventeenth century as well as more recent figures such as Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and Henry Ford. When highlighting key business personalities, Baida avoids life histories, instead giving readers "the patterns of behavior insofar as they affect business values. the person's philosophy," recognized Business History Review contributor Joseph F. Rishel. Baida also examines "the literature of success in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries." In the book, Baida recounts "the trend in which business values have changed from colonial times to the present in astonishing and self-destructive ways. TAs a consequence of mass production of consumer goods, salesmanship (that is, style, wit, charm) replaced character," informed Rishel. "Baida is careful not to preach; he doesn't need to," stated Stuttaford. Baida's survey of business ethics across time "fills an academic vacuum and fills it abundantly," remarked Rishel, forecasting that "the book. should be well-received."

"The style [of Poor Richard's Legacy] is readable and often entertaining," described Rishel. In Washington Monthly, John Schwartz prefaced complaints of "silly writing" and errors due to "Baida's reliance on books and clippings instead of his own digging, "with the comment "any book that tries to do so much in so little space is going to have failings." Schwartz was extremely complimentary, calling Poor Richard's Legacy "a damn useful book, a kind of Cliffs Notes of business history and thinking." Schwartz recommended Poor Richard's Legacy to "anyone who reads the business pages."

Baida also wrote "A Nurse's Story," a prize-winning short story based on a nurses' strike. Its complete story collection was published in 2001. Peter Baida's widow, Diane Cole, wrote in the book's afterword: "No publication is as poignant as that of a posthumous first volume of fiction. With Peter Baida's "A Nurse's Story and Others," this sense is further compounded by the fact that the author died within months of the title story winning first prize in the O. Henry Short Story Awards.

"Rather than allow life's heavy-handed irony to overshadow Peter's work, however, I prefer to let it serve, instead, as a lens that helps illuminate Peter's literary achievement. On the most obvious level, given Peter's own history of illness, it is no accident that many of his stories are set against a medical backdrop. More subtly, these stories reveal that what Peter learned from his travels in the world of illness was a compassion for the vulnerable. And it is this understanding, one that goes beyon empathy, that suffuses his work.

"As the title of the collection's concluding story so aptly puts it, there is always a "reckoning," and its impact endures for generations. And now, with Peter's death, comes the summing up of his life, and his work. He lived the way he wrote, with a straightforward grace, precision, and insight — and yes, a dark, inescapable irony — that everyone who knew and loved him will miss. But Peter's voice, in all its fullness, is here, in his stories, to be read, and cherished. The writer's legacy he would have wished."

Source: Thomson Gale, "Peter Baida," in Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2004.