Monday Book Recs--See You At Harry's by Jo Knowles

I didn't know what this book was about before I read it. People said things like "heart-breaking" and "tear-jerker," but all of Jo's book could be described in that way. I could have poked around on-line and found out more, but I figured that I would just let the book unfold on its own, the way that good books always do. I was sure that the story was about a young teenage boy who was dealing with coming out to his family, and that resonated a lot to me because we have a young family friend who came out as transgender in the last year. That was the first part of the book I read, and I went to sleep and came back to it the next day.

*warning spoilers*

And then it happened, the part of the book where I got the rug pulled out from under me. Yes, a lot of middle grade books are about dealing with death. You can even play a game where you decide who is going to die. If I'd had to bet, it would have been the gay teenager because then the family would have had to deal with their lack of acceptance and gay suicides have been a lot on my mind in recent months. But that's not what happened. The character who died wasn't the one I would have expected and suddenly I wasn't reading a book anymore. I felt like I was living in this world, had been drawn in and I wasn't at all sure that I wanted to be there. So this isn't so much a book review as it is a very particular reader's reaction to a very well written story about a child's death.

First of all, I was ANGRY at the mother for the way she reacted. It wasn't because the main character was angry, I don't think. This was my personal reaction, as a mother. A mother is not ALLOWED to react that way. She HAS to be the one to pick up the pieces. She doesn't get to hide away in her room while the kids fall apart.

In some part of my mind, I knew that this reaction was because I had been the mother who dealt with the death of a child when
my youngest daughter daughter died at birth almost 7 years ago now. I did not allow myself to fall apart. I cried a few tears at the funeral, and occasionally I would cry alone, in the middle of the night when no one could hear me. But above all, I was a mother of five other children and I made sure that they never had to deal with my grief, and I tried to help them through theirs. It didn't occur to me for years later what it would mean to my children to see me NOT cry, and how my numb insistence on routine would turn me into someone who did not have normal emotional reactions. To this day, my children say that they can't gauge my emotional reactions about anything. One daughter claims she has never seen me cry about anything ever and believes that, in fact, I never have, and that I am simply "too strong" to cry. She feels guilty because she cries about things very easily--and very normally.

It's obvious to me now that I fell into a deep depression that I am only in the last year mostly recovered from. I'm not sure it was as obvious to people around me, because I remained so utterly capable. I continued to do everything that I had always done. I may have seemed quiet, but there were very few signs that I was suffering so enormously, because I became very, very good at pretending that everything was fine. I also spent many hours alone, bitterly angry that no one seemed to be able to tell that I was falling into a very deep pit of emptiness. I never thought I was that good of an actress, but was astonished at how many people thought I was some kind of inspiration. But the clothes were washed, dinner made, the dishes cleaned. I did an Ironman, continued to write books and raise my kids.

The characters in Jo's book seemed to me to have a more open grief, and I envied them for that. Fern believes that she is at fault for what happened, for not watching her brother Charlie closely enough. There are some people who blame themselves for tragedies and some people who don't. I suppose from my perspective, I wish that I were one of the ones who didn't, but I am like Fern. There is still a part of me that believes that if I had gone to the hospital earlier, or if I had not chosen to go with a lay midwife for the birth, or if I had not gone running the week before, or if I had eaten better--or SOMETHING--then my daughter would not have died. Maybe it is true and maybe it isn't. In the end, you stop living in the world of "what if" and move on to the world of "what is." Not because you want to live there, but because you do, and you get used to it.

I also connected strongly with Fern's brief temptation to dull the emotional pain of her loss with physical pain. This was a very real part of grief for me. I tended to use exercise, specifically training for an Ironman, to keep myself sort-of-sane. I would sometimes train in the middle of the night if I couldn't sleep. Or I would do an extra session mid-day, to get me through. An intense exercise session is very effective at dulling out other pains for a few hours. It also helped me create a sense of time that otherwise would have been lacking. Each day, I could visually cross off that day's training, and so time moved on. Without that, I suspect I would have felt a very strange sense of no movement forward. I kept hoping that there would be a way to get to the place other people kept promising me would be ahead, where I would be recovered from the grief. That was pretty much all I wanted, to either be the person I was before, or rush forward to the person I would be after.

Fern goes through a funeral where the minister offers a poem (in fact the same poem that Jo sent to me, all those years ago) that says "When all that's left of me is love, give me away." I wish that my experience with religion had been like this. Instead, I felt pressure to say "I understand why this happened. It has made me a better person." To this day, I reject this way of thinking. I reject that I will ever say that my learning and growing was worth the cost of my daughter's death. That doesn't mean I haven't learned and grown. I have, but I don't know that I could not have done that in only one way. I also think that I probably would have grown more without the five years of depression where I stopped interacting with the world and feeling things as a normal person does.

When the neighborhood tries to be kind to Fern's family and brings them tray after tray of food, which Fern's father takes to the restaurant because no one wants to eat, I thought again of how frustrated I was that I would answer a doorbell ring and see someone bringing more food. Fern throws up soon after she realizes that Charlie is dead and for days, no one in her family can eat, which seems to me the only normal response to a death like that, but people just keep bringing food for some reason, as if food fights grief and pain. I don't understand this, but I remember it. I had to spend time finding space in my fridge for this food which we could not eat, and say thank you to people who were well-meaning but not really understanding. Or maybe the food was just their way of connecting.

In the Homecoming scene, Fern and her brother go out dancing and have a grand time, though there is a bittersweet sense of loss that hangs over them despite the sense that Charlie would have wanted them to be happy. This is truly one of the worst parts of grief, that we move on even if we don't want to. For us, the living, life keeps going. We don't have the choice of going back. We only have the choice of being sad or being happy. Being happy brings with it an enormous sense of guilt, as if we can never be happy again if someone has died. But we are, and Harry's ends on this happy note.

I turned the final page and thought how much longer the road of grief would, of course be, for this family. But it's a good stopping place, and that's what books do. They have stopping places, unlike the real world where we continue to live, go back to grieving and guilt, and swirl around in the cycle of denial, anger, depression and acceptance for years on end. There is a stopping place, but it doesn't last for long.