A Suitable Companion for the End of Your Life - Robert McGill

My second post-pandemic themed book, this is a dark look into the future where a plague can only be avoided by being "flatpacked"  --- preserved alive for future inflation (as in literally being inflated like a balloon), albeit without memories.  The main character, Regan, is thoroughly unlikeable, even to herself, and the flatpacks she orders to end her life lead her to an alternative she'd not imagined.  Is obliviousness a true escape from death?  

I felt the story was contrived and incomplete, posing questions without answers.  I can't say I recommend it though I think it will be sticking with me for awhile.

Published: 2022   Read: January 2023  Genre:Science Fiction

Before Your Memory Fades - Toshikazu Kawaguchi

 This was a lovely, touching read, cleverly asking what we would do if we could go back in the past, yet not be able to change anything in the present?  In short vignettes, Kawaguchi introduces us to four individuals attempting to reconcile a hurt in their lives and the lives of their loved ones.  Each chapter is a surprise, a gentle unveiling of getting beyond that pain and moving on into the future.  This is the third book in the series.  

The setting is a coffee shop where one can go back to the past "before the coffee gets cold" in the cup poured for the time traveler.  Throughout the story, the characters are deciding how they would respond to the dichotomies posed in the book "What if the world was ending tomorrow? One Hundred Questions".  Each question asks the reader to make a decision about a situation with the end of the world in mind, forcing an answer we would likely avoid in real life. 

My mind has a problem keeping track of characters with unfamiliar names, in this case Japanese ones, but I caught on eventually.  I don't know if I'll read the other books but I enjoyed discovering this one.

Quotes:

"Burnout syndrome is considered by some to be a type of depression.  But while depression begins with the stress of fatigue or a large shock like an accident or a loss, burnout syndrome originates with the thought that all of one's efforts are in vain.  It strikes right at a time when life is not turning out as expected, despite devotedly pouring one's soul into a certain activity, usually one's work."

"Inside every person is an inherent capability to make it through any kind of difficulty.  Everyone has that energy.  But sometimes when that energy flows via our anxiety valve, the flow can be restricted.  The greater that anxiety, the greater the strength needed to open the valve and release the energy.  That strength is empowered by hope.  You could say that hope is the power to believe in the future."

"Something I strongly believe is that we mustn't allow the death of a person to be the cause of unhappiness.  The reason for that is simple: if we let everyone who dies be a cause for unhappiness, that would mean people are being born to become unhappy.  But the opposite in fact is true.  People are always born for the sake of happiness."

Published: 2022   Read: December 2022  Genre: Fiction, Philosophy

A Dirty Job - Christopher Moore

I've read other books by this author and enjoy his sharp witted dialogue and quirky characters.  In this novel, the hero, a Beta-Male named Charles Asher, is given the job of Death Merchant, responsible for collecting the souls of the recently departed.  The absurd and zany adventures was a great escape for a few nights of reading.  There's a sub-text of how we deal with the loss of loved ones and our fear of death.  

Quotes:

"[Talking about his Mom dying with his sister] You're doing the same thing, trying to reconcile all the moms that Mom ever was - the one you wanted, the one she was when you needed her and she was there, the one she was when she didn't understand.  Most of us don't live our lives with one, integrated self that meets the world, we're a whole bunch of selves.  When someone dies, they all integrate into the soul - the essence of who we are, beyond the different face we wear throughout our lives."

"I've seen it again and again, said Charlie, more with men than women...a wife or husband dies, and it's like the survivor is roped to him like a mountain climber who's fallen into a crevasse.  If the survivor can't let go--cut them loose, I guess--the dead will drag them right into the grave."

Published: 2006  Read: December 2022  Genre: Fiction 

 

Rules for Visiting - Jessica Francis Kane

 The reviews on this one were good and I liked the concept - a woman reaches out to connect in person with her friends from the past in the age of instant communication.  It missed the mark.  The heroine, May, is strange; a detached, disconnected, landscape gardener.  The author interweaves descriptions of the personalities of various North American trees into the narrative to illustrate the choices of personalities we can adopt.  I think that what was she was trying to do.  The back story of May's life was so obscure that when it was revealed it was anticlimactic.  Some thoughtful observations kept me reading but in the end, the book fell flat

Quotes:

"Friends are God's apology for relations (Hugh Kingsmith)"

"...the Dunbar number--the maximum number of people with whom any individual can maintain stable relationships--and how, despite predictions, it hadn't gotten any bigger in the age of social media."

"A house is a physical thing that is build with wood and bricks, furnished with furniture and carpets, while a home takes time and is built with memories." 

"Perhaps a best friend is someone who...holds the story of your life in mind.  Sometimes in music a melodic line is so beautiful the notes feel inevitable; you can anticipate the next note through a long rest.  Maybe that is friendship.  A best friend holds your story in mind so notes don't have to be repeated." 

Published: 2019  Read: April 2020  Genre: Fiction 

 

Joy Enough - Sarah McColl

This was a book written from grief, a slow unfolding of the relationship between a dying mother and daughter and that daughter and her own soon to be divorced husband.  I got an advanced copy at the Nashville Festival of Books 2018.  It is reflective and dreamlike, struggling to stay afloat while the anchors of her life a set adrift.

Quotes: 

"Our marriage, in the end, had echoed with loneliness.  How many times had we been restaurant silent, the couple that dines wordlessly, then beams up into the server's face at the offer of more water and dessert?  To feel the absence of affection between us where once there had been so much, florid and overflowing - that was lonely.  This was just being alone."

Published:  2018  Read: November 2018  Genre: Memoir

An Absent Mind - Eric Rill

I'm always drawn to stories about aging, death and dying, just one of my many quirks.  This book tells the story of a family losing their father to Alzheimer's disease.  Saul, the father, reflects on his illness and each family member shares their perspective and experiences as he continues to decline.  It's a touching portrayl of the slow, inexorable path of this horrible disease.  The feelings and interactions of the family members with Saul and with each other are realistic.  The author shows us how the actions of a person can be interpreted in different ways, leading to misunderstandings and incorrect judgments.

It's a quick read on an all-to-common experience these days.


Published: 2015  Read: April 2016  Genre: Fiction


ISBN:  3 1740 08610 6352

Secondhand Souls - Christopher Moore

I finished my contract for work and I've been binge reading, a not so bad experience!  I finished this book in one day, how heavenly to read and read and read for as long as I wanted!

Moore writes strange, darkly humorous tales with fast, wise-cracking dialogue.  I've read most of his previous books so I snatched this one when I saw it at the library.

How to describe a Christopher Moore story?  In this one, his hero, Chris, is trapped in a 14 inch high cobbled together body made of spam and mechanical parts wrapped in a shiny robe, the result of almost being killed in a previous book by the forces of evil, three harpies from hell.  The hero's daughter is the queen of death, though only 7 years old.  She's being cared for by a lesbian couple and watched over by neighboring Chinese and Russian? grandmothers.  Chris's girlfriend has an army of meat puppets under her Victorian style home that she makes outfits for.  They are all riled up when the forces of evil return and start stealing souls instead of allowing them to pass on to heaven.  Weird?  That's just the start of it.

I always laugh out loud at Moore's books and the absurd, fantastical, irreverent characters and story line.  Not for the faint of heart.

Published:  2015  Read:  October 2015  Genre: Fiction, humor

A Grief Observed - C. S. Lewis

This memoir of an experience of grief has been on my TBR list for a long time.  I think I'd postponed looking for it because I thought it would be long and heavy reading.  To my surprise, its less than 100 pages.  It 's essentially Lewis' journals written after the death of his wife of less than 5 years from cancer.  They had married when he was well into his forties,  She was divorced, with two boys.  She brought them to England to be near Lewis who she had corresponded with from America and become a close friend and admirer.

C.S. Lewis was a well-known Christian apologetic, someone who defends Christian beliefs with reason and logic.

My edition had an introduction by Madeleine L'Engle, author of "A Wrinkle in Time" and "Two Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage", and a fellow Christian writer of Lewis's. She was critical of the book which put me off initially - if you read it, skip her introduction until after.

The book is a journey through grief and loss and coming to terms with a crisis of faith.  His "observations" are universal.

"This is important.  One never meets just Cancer, or War, or Unhappiness (or Happiness).  One only meets each hour or moment that comes."

A good part of the book is about him questioning his faith in God and questioning his own doubt.

"Sooner or later I must face the question in plain language.  What reason have we, except our own desperate wishes, to believe that God is, by any standard we can conceive, 'good'?

"From a rational point of view what new factor has H.'s [his wife's] death introduced into the problem of the universe?  What grounds has it given me for doubting all that I believe?  ...If my house has collapsed at one blow, that is because it was a house of cards.  The faith which 'took these things into acocunt' was not faith but imagination".

In the end, he recognizes he has been on a journey and his faith has been with him all along.

"My jottings show something of the process[toward getting through grief] but not so much as I 'd hoped.  ..like the warming of a room or the coming of daylight...when you first notice them they have already been going on for some time."

One quirky note, one of his friends actually gave him a copy of the book to read (it had been published under a pseudonym).


Published: 1961  Read: August 2015  Genre: Memoir

Chasing Daylight - Eugene O'Kelly

Sub-title: How My Forthcoming Death Transformed My Life

Now that's a sub-title that makes me pick up a book.  The author, CEO of KPMG, a global accounting and financial consulting firm, finds out at 55 years old that he has inoperable brain cancer and less than six months to live.  He chooses to apply the skills, talents, and attitude that led to his success in life to having a successful death.

It was disconcerning at first to see the business skills and practices I'd worked with in my career being applied to dealing with death. But the author knew what he wanted to do - go out as successfully as he had climbed to success in life.

Some quotes that illustrate where he came from, how he functioned at work:

"I cultivated the ability to make big shifts quickly.  When something in my life no longer worked I could abandon it with little sentiment,"

"One sanctuary from all the intensity was golf.  ...I admired what the game called for: honor, personal accountability, precision, mental disipline, and endurance."

"Just months before and for my whole life before, I had been used to --and expected-- people operating at a very high standard....our indexes for evaluating people was conpetency."

He applied his ability to "make big shifts" to recognizing he needed to be more forgiving of himself and others. "And what if I didn't shoot par?  If things didn't go as planned?  That would have to be good too.  There was always something that could make even a bad day or a bad round good.  One nice shot.  One kind gesture.  Something."

He rethinks his beliefs about commitment. "In business...your commitment was routinely measured by how many hours you were willing to work".  He understands after dealing with his suddenly shortened future that commitment is really about depth.  "..commitment is measured not by the time one is willing to give up but, more accurately, by the energy one wants to put in, by how present one is." He reflects "Before my illness, I had considered commitment king among virtues.  After I was diagnosed I came to consider consciousness king...For one thing it could help others to understand the end better.  Maybe we'll discover that death is even something worth embracing."

I could see as the story went on that he was, in his last few weeks, embracing the real priorities of life; family, friends and being involved in the present moment.  "Soon I realized to identify whole breeds of people who did not live in the present, despite what they may have believed.  They lived either in the future or in the past, or maybe nowhere at all....People who don't listen, who ask questions without waiting for the whole answer."

He embraces simplicity.  He observes that many of the people he knows "have no clear timeline to stop what they were so busy at, to step back, to ask what exactly they were doing with their life. Part of me understood that they couldn't stop, because if they did stop they would stop being relevant.  But being relevant was not relevant.  At some point its time to transition."

He applied his same organized, goal oriented mind to what he called "unwinding" from the relationships in his life.  He began with "the outer circle", saying goodbye, saying why people mattered to him, sharing the good memories, reaching closure.  It's something encouraged in hospice to help those dying to accept their circumstances and he was more peaceful with the relationships in his life by making the effort to reach out and end those relationships in a deliberate way.

The book's last chapter is written by his wife, Corinne.  At the end, he was doing all he could to help her and his children, and himself to  experience a good death.  A powerful, moving read because the author stayed true to who he was, without apologies, and embraced the changes he recognized he needed to make before his life closed.

Published: 2006  Read: May 2015  Genre: Auto-biography

ISBN: 0-07-147172-3

A Lesson Before Dying - Ernest J Gaines

This book was another used bookstore find.  A young black man is convicted of a murder that happens during a convenience store holdup.  He was just along for the ride but the real robbers are killed along with the store owner and Jefferson has no one to back up his claim that he was not involved.

The story begins with his conviction where the defense appeals for mercy by describing him as "a hog...to be put in the electric chair" and with that twisted logic, not worth sentencing to death.  The conviction is pronounced and he's taken to jail.  His family appeals to Grant, a man who got out of the poverty of their lives, went to college and returned to teach in the town where he grew up.  Jefferson's godmother appeals to Grant to teach him to be a man as he goes to his execution.  Grant is a reluctant teacher, almost cowardly.  He sees himself as a realist and dismisses her wishes as pointless. Nevertheless, he goes to the jail, bullied into it by his aunt, the godmother's best friend, and finds Jefferson convinced his life is not worth any more than a hog's.  Grant keeps visiting and a trust develops that brings Jefferson dignity in death.

I liked how the story unfolded slowly and kept me wondering if Grant would be able to reach Jefferson.  The characters are real people, trying to do the right thing.  Twenty years after being published the treatment of African-Americans in the South has been portrayed in many other stories. This one makes the heartbreak painfully real.

Published:  1993  Read: May 2015  Genre: Fiction

ISBN: 9 780375 702709