My path to this book was pretty typical for me - it was featured in the Sunday NYT Book Review with outstanding reviews attached. Coming straight out of the holidays with giftcards burning holes in my pockets I tried to stave off the feeling that I had to have this book (I mean, I have so many I haven't read yet), but there was something about it that made me need to buy it.Maybe it was the picture on the front cover. It's kind of haunting, don't you think? I mean, to the random passerby in the bookstore, it's reminiscent of childhood. As I read the book, though, I came to realize the significance of the popsicles lies in the fact that, as Romm's mother nears death, its one of the only foods she can still stomach.
Part of the reason I loved this book so much is because of how close I've grown to my mother over the past few years. Moving out of the shadow of teenage angst and curfew arguments really does wonders for a relationship. Most notably, I catch myself thinking about how she felt when her mother died my freshman year of college and how that will, eventually, happen to me someday as well. There was something about the way Romm described it that was mentioned in the NYT review that just hit home all too accurately.
“She’s building a boat to sail my mother out. . . . Barb will build the boat of morphine and pillows and then I will have no mother and the days will be wordless and empty.”And then I will have no mother and the days will be wordless and empty. I must have read that sentence thirty times over that Sunday morning and decided I had to buy the book the Tuesday it came out. So I made it until Wednesday, broke down and bought it, and read it over the following weekend.
To be honest, it was all such an emotional blur, I don't even know if I should say whether it's good or not. When something is that truthful and that honest, you can't label it "good" or "bad," it just is the truth. Does that make sense? There were moments late at night that weekend where I would read with tears streaming down my face, feeling so much pain for Romm, feeling so much frustration for her mother, the exhaustion of her father. Knowing that someday that will be me is a terrifying thought, but one almost all of us think from time to time.
This book is just incredible. It effortlessly struggles with the anger, the grief, the acceptance, the anticipatory sorrow (because by the time it actually happens, you can't feel much of anything). And I say it effortlessly struggles because obviously there's a struggle. There's a struggle of Romm to accept her mother won't be around forever and that, at this point, there's nothing she can do but be there and wait. There's the struggle of her mother, a once self-sufficient woman, to resign herself to death and dependence upon everyone else in the meantime. And yet Romm's words in no way stifle exactly what she wants to say when she wants to say it. So, in a way, it's effortless.
I'm well aware this is a meandering, train of thought type of discussion. I think turning this into a clean write up would make it lose some of its meaning. At the end of the day, this book was beautiful, sad, horrible, terrifying, and so painfully real that I couldn't stop turning the pages.
