Love Medicine Essay
Lipids has a gift Of being able to heal, which is the gift of the medicine touch. The medicine touch is by Lipids helping elderly people by making hand motions onto their body to help them feel better or make their problems go away. Knowing that pasha’s grandpa has obviously been aging, becoming senile and sick, and also claims he has second-childhood, is trying to help his grandpa with his medicine touch. As the story progresses, grandpa Shape administers an affair with another woman by the name of Lulu Almandine, that also lives at the senior citizen home.
Lipids believes that grandpa Kappa’s mind is lost, UT he still insists on chasing Lulu. As for grandma Shape, she wants Lipids to use his gift of touch to make grandpa Shape loyal to her. Alpha’s touch does not work on grandpa and therefore he is bothered to see the problems this has caused between his grandma and grandpa. In the story, Lipids is the focus of “Love Medicine” because he plays an important role between the affects that the medicine of love can have on people when he tries to fix it, believing in having a great idea, and what happens when messing with love medicine goes wrong.
Many people have different ways and ideas to fix something or someone. Such as in the story, love medicine is a healing coerce that some people have a natural gift for like Lipids. Love medicine and medicine touch are both defined differently. Even though both these terms may sound the same, they each have a different significance in the story. Love medicine is defined as a way to cure something or someone that has lost interest in their significant other. The medicine touch is the gift that Lipids has and is best described as him helping people out with their health and problems.
Lipids believes using his medicine touch will help his grandpa out, therefore he says “l know the Rick of the mind and body inside and out without ever having trained for it, because I got the touch. It’s a thing you got to be born with” (275). He uses his gift to try and help the people around him. For instance, he tries and helps others to easily feel a sensation Of relief, “l take my fingers and I snap them on the knots. The medicine flows out of me. The touch. I run my fingers up the maps of those rivers of veins… ND it helps them” (275). Lipids states that the medicine flows out of him, meaning his fingers are touching the elderly people’s skin and working his way to make them feel better. His grandma Shape has said that he thinks with his heart, “That anti stupidity… Their brains just in their heart, like yours is” (281). This example gives a good reason as to why he loves and is devoted to help people. Lipids also tries to use the medicine of love to help the relationship between his grandparents.
His grandpa does not share the same amount of love to his grandma anymore. Grandma wants Lipids to use the touch to make his grandpa stay at home with her, spend time together and strengthen their bond: “Grandma tried to get me to put the touch on grandpa soon after he began stepping out” (232). Alpha’s gift of touch was not enough to change the behavior of his grandpa, and that is when love medicine needed to be used. As explained in the story, love medicine is not something to take lightly, “You got to think it over.
Choose the right one. You could really mess up your life grinding up the wrong little thing” (241 This is said to be true because Lipids finds out what happens when he does not use the right elements to make his very own love medicine for his grandparents. Lipids believes that he has a great idea for the love medicine that he is about to give his grandparents. Since his medicine touch didn’t work on rand, Lipids wants to make his very own love medicine to help his grandparents bond more and help grandpa say faithful to grandma.
Lipids wanted to self-shoot a male and female goose and have his grandparents eat the hearts together because goose are birds who have a strong love connection for each other. Lipids believes having the hearts blessed by a priest will make the love connection even stronger between his grandparents. When Lipids wasn’t able to shoot the birds that he wanted, he resorted to other means “l took an evil shortcut. I looked at birds that were dead and frozen” (284).
Lipids knows that this might result in decreasing the effects Of the love medicine, but he did not care at that point: “I ignored all the danger, all the limits, for was tired of sitting… I told myself love medicine was simple. Told myself the old superstitions were just that-strange beliefs” (283). By doing this, Lipids convinces himself that love medicine works by faith, not by the fact that it is an old superstition, “l finally convinced myself that the real power to the love medicine was not the goose heart itself but the faith in the cure” (284).
Killing geese to have their hearts isn’t the solution to cure love, paving faith on one another and working things out will make the bond stronger between two people. This approach to the idea of love medicine leads to other problems and complications. When Lipids tried to go and get the hearts blessed by a priest, the priest does not do it because he is too “busy” and didn’t seem he didn’t want to do this favor for him. Lipids understood that a blessing by a nun diminishes the effects of the love medicine, but Lipids is very frantic to get these hearts blessed.
When he approaches Sister Martin and explains that the medicine is for love, she misconstrued what the blessing was for: “You don’t need any declined. I’m sure any girl would like you exactly the way you are” (285). The Sister also refused to give the blessing because she also thought that it was odd for someone to try and bless an animal’s heart, so Lipids is forced to take holy water and bless the hearts himself. Lipids blessing the hearts himself only decreased the effects of the love medicine and believing this can be the only way for the medicine to able to function properly.
While gone through everything to get the love medicine for his grandma, Lipids returns to his house with the insufficient love medicine and tried to UT it into good use. Unfortunately, grandpa did not want to eat the heart because he felt something was being done behind his back: “She knew that he knew she was working medicine” (286). Grandma loves to work with medicine in general since she believes that it helps cure problems, but in this case, Lipids was the one who was working with medicine.
Grandpa didn’t find the goose hearts appealing and said “I don’t want to eat this” (286). Grandpa knew something was up and felt that there was something suspicious going on and had the right to feel that way. In order for the love medicine to work is hat both of Alpha’s grandparents must eat the hearts. The grandma decides to take the matter into her own hands, “She… Slugged him between the shoulder blades to make him swallow… Only thing is, he choked” (287).
Grandpa Shape chokes so bad that he choked to death while trying to “eat’ the heart. Eating the heart is supposed to help grandma and grandpa’s relationship for the better, but things ended up going south. Lipids comes to realize that after his grandpa’s death and that love medicine is something not to be played with. In his epiphany, he states, “Maybe I can’t admit what I did. My touch had gone worthless, that is true” (287). As much as Lipids wanted to help his grandparents, messing around and playing with medicine can end in tragedy.
But there is a bit of irony. The love medicine worked better than grandpa and Lipids has ever thought: “Its the love medicine, my Lipids… It was stronger than we thought. He came back even after death to claim me to his side” (290). Grandpa and Lipids achieved their goal, but because Lipids played with the original medicine, the results were not what they expected. As the story comes into conclusion, Lipids has obviously learned a lesson awards the end. Love medicine is not something to take lightly.
Lipids is a fundamental character because he shows the effects of love medicine and what happens when it is not properly used. Louise Reedier needs Lipids to show love medicine being used and how it actually comes to life. Lipids becomes a central character because his ability to use the touch and love medicine shows the power of not only him, but also his heritage. At first, Lipids tries to rationalize his using a store-bought turkey heart over a self- shot goose heart by saying that love medicine itself is never a cure. People’s life in its power is all that matters.
