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She always read the end of a book first because she couldn’t wait to find out how things would turn out.
I also read the end of books before I bget to them, but I usually wait until I'm about 2/3's into the book.
We all have a lot more to read than we can read and a lot more to do than we can do. Still, one of the things I learned from Mom is this: Reading isn’t the opposite of doing; it’s the opposite of dying. I will never be able to read my mother’s favorite books without thinking of her—and when I pass them on and recommend them, I’ll know that some of what made her goes with them; that some of my mother will live on in those readers, readers who may be inspired to love the way she loved and do their own version of what she did in the world.
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If our family was an airline, Mom was the hub and we were the spokes. You rarely went anywhere nonstop; you went via Mom, who directed the traffic flow and determined the priorities:
It was the women of Afghanistan, my mother believed, who—once they’d been granted access to books and education—would be the salvation of that country.
I consider "A Thousand Splendid Suns" life-changing - or at least paradigm shifting - for me. It's one of the most important bookd I've ever read.
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We found ourselves discussing the three kinds of fateful choices that exist in the two books: the ones characters make knowing that they can never be undone; the ones they make thinking they can but learn they can’t; and the ones they make thinking they can’t and only later come to understand, when it’s too late, when “nothing can be undone,” that they could have.
Mom had always taught all of us to examine decisions by reversibility—that is, to hedge our bets. When you couldn’t decide between two things, she suggested you choose the one that allowed you to change course if necessary.
One of the many things I love about bound books is their sheer physicality.
I often seek electronic books, but they never come after me. They may make me feel, but I can’t feel them. They are all soul with no flesh, no texture, and no weight. They can get in your head but can’t whack you upside it.
I scribbled down on a scrap of paper a version of that question and two other things I didn’t want to forget from this book and stuck the creased paper in my wallet. Here’s what I wrote: 1. Ask: “Do you want to talk about how you’re feeling?” 2. Don’t ask if there’s anything you can do. Suggest things, or if it’s not intrusive, just do them. 3. You don’t have to talk all the time. Sometimes just being there is enough.
For me, there’s something about planes that isolates and intensifies sadness, the way a looking glass can magnify the sun until it grows unbearably hot and burns.
“That’s one of the things books do. They help us talk. But they also give us something we all can talk about when we don’t want to talk about ourselves.”
Universal health care was always an issue Mom cared about, and the more care she got, the angrier she became that good medicine wasn’t available for everyone in the United States. The pharmacy almost always provoked a political discussion or diatribe.
There was one sure way to avoid being assigned an impromptu chore in our house—be it taking out the trash or cleaning your room—and that was to have your face buried in a book. Like churches during the Middle Ages, books conferred instant sanctuary.
“I’ve always thought it was interesting that your brother preferred the Narnia books and you loved the Tolkien. I think your brother liked the Christian symbolism of the Narnia books—you just weren’t interested in that.”
To me, Tolkien’s series has always seemed wonderfully and purely pagan.
I disagree: Fridok is absolutely Christ.
“You don’t have to have one emotion at a time.”
The owners of the book were born and died; what remained was the physical book itself. It needed to be handled with increasing delicacy and care as the binding grew loose with age, but you knew that it was the exact same book that others had read before you, and that you had read in the years before.
The minister’s final prayer for his son is simple but profound: “I’ll pray that you grow up a brave man in a brave country. I will pray you find a way to be useful.”
From Robiknson's "Gilead."
One of Mom’s favorite passages from Gilead was: “This is an important thing, which I have told many people, and which my father told me, and which his father told him. When you encounter another person, when you have dealings with anyone at all, it is as if a question is being put to you. So you must think, What is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation?”
“What is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation?” It helped you remember that people aren’t here for you; everyone is here for one another.
In the book, Lamott says the two best prayers are “Help me, Help me, Help me” and “Thank you, Thank you, Thank you.”
I think there’s something reassuring about any family dynamic untouched by changing circumstances.
Kindness has much more to do with what you do than how you do it.
interesting is what it had to say about books and religion. I love how Brooks shows that every great religion shares a love of books, of reading, of knowledge. The individual books may be different, but reverence for books is what we all have in common.
Before Mom’s illness they’d developed the ability to selectively ignore each other, a habit I’ve witnessed in most long-term couples.
Yep
My mother delighted in the ways great mystery writers could turn a city or town into a character and reveal its hidden corners—where you might hide, where you go with money, where you slink to when you have none, where a certain person would blend in and where he would stick out like a bloody thumb.
I realized then that for all of us, part of the process of Mom’s dying was mourning not just her death but also the death of our dreams of things to come. You don’t really lose the person who has been; you have all those memories.
I was learning that when you’re with someone who is dying, you may need to celebrate the past, live the present, and mourn the future all at the same time.
This was another lesson I learned from Mom over the course of our book club: Never make assumptions about people. You never know who can and will want to help you until you ask.
I do find it tough when a character I love dies, of course. You can truly miss characters. Not like you miss people, but you can still miss them. I don’t think I’ll ever get over Melanie’s death in Gone With the Wind. But I’m still so glad I got to know her.
And what I love about Dickens is the way he presents all types of cruelty. You need to learn to recognize these things right from the start. Evil almost always starts with small cruelties.”
The greatest gift you can give anyone is your undivided attention—yet I’d been constantly dividing mine.
How do you do that? How do you talk to fifty or a hundred different people without interrupting them or yourself? And I understood suddenly what Kabat-Zinn means about mindfulness—it isn’t a trick or a gimmick. It’s being present in the moment. When I’m with you, I’m with you. Right now. That’s all. No more and no less.
That’s one of the amazing things great books like this do—they don’t just get you to see the world differently, they get you to look at people, the people all around you, differently.”
I did start to notice something, however: a difference in tone when this last question was asked by someone whose mother or father or both had recently died, especially of cancer. It was as if we were reading the same book, but one of us had gotten ahead of the other: they’d made it to the end, and I was still somewhere in the middle. The “How are you doing?” was really “I think I may know how you are doing.”
we are a pretty awkward society when it comes to talking about dying. It’s supposed to happen offstage, in hospitals, and no one wants to dwell on it too much.
Greta Samuelson liked this
What I suddenly understood was that a thank-you note isn’t the price you pay for receiving a gift, as so many children think it is, a kind of minimum tribute or toll, but an opportunity to count your blessings. And gratitude isn’t what you give in exchange for something; it’s what you feel when you are blessed—blessed to have family and friends who care about you, and who want to see you happy. Hence the joy from thanking.
getting people to practice gratitude. The latter therapy has its roots in a philosophy called Naikan, developed by Ishin Yoshimoto. Naikan reminds people to be grateful for everything.
“We all owe everyone for everything that happens in our lives. But it’s not owing like a debt to one person—it’s really that we owe everyone for everything. Our whole lives can change in an instant—so each person who keeps that from happening, no matter how small a role they play, is also responsible for all of it. Just by giving friendship and love, you keep the people around you from giving up—and each expression of friendship or love may be the one that makes all the difference.”
That day at chemo, we talked once more about the ending of The Reluctant Fundamentalist. “I just really want to know which character dies. I’ve read the ending again and again,” I said. “I hate not knowing.” “I do too. That’s why I always read endings first. But sometimes you just can’t know what’s going to happen, even when you know everything there is to know. So you prepare for the worst but hope for the best.”
It had been, I realized then, a year and a half filled with many odd superstitions that would come over me suddenly—what Joan Didion would call “magical thinking.” All I could focus on was the following nonsensical equation: If the manatees came, it would be a good day. Mom would feel “better.” If they didn’t show, if they had been there before us or came after, then it would be a “not great” day.
It took me a while to understand Nessa’s role. But then it struck me: athletes and executives have coaches; Nessa was a coach too, with wisdom that none of us had, even though we’d all lost people we loved.
Mom felt that a special burden had been placed on the women of the generation that followed hers; because they were the first to have certain opportunities and choices, theirs hadn’t been an easy road. Weller writes about the “hurt, anger, and heightened self-regard shared by female age mates whose elevated expectations had left them unwilling to be pushed aside in the same ‘due course’ of life that had bound earlier generations of women.”
told the headmistress that I had, indeed, managed to have it all—a husband, a career, three children—but that I was tired all the time, exhausted in fact. And she said, ‘Oh, dear—did I forget to mention that you can, indeed, have it all, but you need a lot of help!’ ”
I think women should have choices and should be able to do what they like, and I think it’s a great choice to stay at home and raise kids, just as it’s a great choice to have a career. But I don’t entirely approve of people who get advanced degrees and then decide to stay at home. I think if society gives you the gift of one of those educations and you take a spot in a very competitive institution, then you should do something with that education to help others.
