The Storyteller

by Jodi Picoult

There are all sorts of losses people suffer—from the small to the large. You can lose your keys, your glasses, your virginity. You can lose your head, you can lose your heart, you can lose your mind. You can relinquish your home to move into assisted living, or have a child move overseas, or see a spouse vanish into dementia. Loss is more than just death, and grief is the gray shape-shifter of emotion.

“It doesn’t matter what it is that leaves a hole inside you. It just matters that it’s there.”

That’s the paradox of loss: How can something that’s gone weigh us down so much?

It turns out that sharing the past with someone is different from reliving it when you’re alone. It feels less like a wound, more like a poultice.

A long time ago, someone once told me that a story will tell itself, when it’s ready.

“No mother should outlive a child.” “It’s no party to outlive your parents, either,” I reply.

“How do you get up every morning and not remember?” “I never said I do not remember,” my grandmother corrects. “I said I prefer to forget.”

If history has a habit of repeating itself, doesn’t someone have to stay behind to shout out a warning? If not me, then who?

Inside each of us is a monster; inside each of us is a saint. The real question is which one we nurture the most, which one will smite the other.

Any military man will tell you that the way to pull a divided group together is to give them a common enemy. This is what Hitler did, when he came to power in 1933 as chancellor. He threaded this philosophy through the Nazi Party, directing his diatribes against those who leaned left politically.

“The only monsters I have ever known were men,”

“It is amazing, what you can make yourself believe, when you have to,” Josef says. “If you keep telling yourself you are a certain kind of person, eventually you will become that person.

Forgiveness is the imitation of God.”

What must you break apart in order to bring a family close together? Bread, of course.

“You don’t make peace only with God. You make it with people. Sin isn’t global. It’s personal. If you do wrong to someone, the only way to fix that is to go to that same person and do right by him.

True love is like bread. It needs the right ingredients, a little heat, and some magic to rise.”

With survival comes sacrifice.

There is a reason the word history has, at its heart, the narrative of one’s life.

Fiction is like that, once it is released into the world: contagious, persistent. Like the contents of Pandora’s box, a story that’s freely given can’t be contained anymore. It becomes infectious, spreading from the person who created it to the person who listens, and passes it on.

It is a strange thing, to contemplate dying.

Sometimes all it takes to become human again is someone who can see you that way, no matter how you present on the surface.

Truth is so much harder than fiction.

“He came every day to that restaurant and sat next to me at the counter until I agreed to let him take me out to dinner.” “You swept him off his feet.” My grandmother laughs. “Hardly. I was all bones. No breasts, no curves, nothing. I had hair that was only an inch long all over my head—the best style I could fashion after the lice were gone. I barely looked like a girl,” she says. “On that first date, I asked him what he saw in me. And he said, My future.”

There are so many ways a family can unravel. All it takes is a tiny slash of selfishness, a rip of greed, a puncture of bad luck. And yet, woven tightly, family can be the strongest bond imaginable.

Jesus didn’t tell us to forgive everyone. He said turn the other cheek, but only if you were the one who was hit. Even the Lord’s Prayer says it loud and clear: Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. Not others. What Jesus challenges us to do is to let go of the wrong done to you personally, not the wrong done to someone else. But most Christians incorrectly assume this means that being a good Christian means forgiving all sins, and all sinners.”

But forgiving isn’t something you do for someone else. It’s something you do for yourself. It’s saying, You’re not important enough to have a stranglehold on me. It’s saying, You don’t get to trap me in the past. I am worthy of a future.”

It does not matter who forgives you, if you’re the one who can’t forget.