The Book of Two Ways

by Jodi Picoult

know that people who are going to die need me to be a mirror—to look in my eyes and know I see who they used to be, not who they are right now.

I once read that every story is a love story. Love of a person, a country, a way of life. Which means, of course, that all tragedies are about losing what you love.

I once read an article about the differences between how men and women converse—how men prefer side-by-side conversation, because face-to-face feels confrontational; how women prefer talking face-to-face to read all the nonverbal cues. The article suggested broaching difficult subjects with your husband in the car, instead of over the dinner table, for this reason.

“I’m not here to finish my dissertation,” I confess. Wyatt nods, his eyes never leaving my face. “Then why come to Egypt?” Because, I think. You’re here. Because I didn’t get to see how this might have turned out. How I might have turned out. Because if there is a garden of maybes, you are the invasive plant I can’t ever get rid of.

Chaotic waters, I translate, surprised that I can still decipher this. It could be referring to rain, or it could be referring to inundation. It can be positive, like when the Nile floods and waters the crops. Or it can be devastating, and demolish a city. Ancient Egyptians believed that the first and most necessary ingredient in the universe was chaos. It could sweep you away, but it was also the place from which all things start anew.

He looks up at me with such wonder that it is clear he included that footnote as an emergency flare, an SOS across continents and oceans. Finally, against all odds, it had found its recipient.

This is how it happens, I tell myself. This is how we start over.

Looking at him was not like stepping outside, unprepared, into a heat that took my breath away. It was more like being able, finally, to exhale.

That giddy thrill of falling, I realized, was rivaled by the discovery of a soft place to land.

In every fairy tale, the only way out is to keep running forward. To never look back.

My mother died on a Tuesday. One moment, the world was a place where I had a parent, and the next, it wasn’t. I remember feeling like something elemental was wrong, like I’d woken up and found the sky green and the grass blue, and was expected to pretend this was normal. She was cremated, and Kieran and I took a boat out to the Isles of Shoals. We scattered her ashes on the sea, and I like to think the tide swam her back to Ireland.

“Relationships aren’t about photo ops. They’re about scaling mountains and crossing deserts, about getting to where you think you belong, about having your partner’s arms around you, and realizing that you don’t fit into them. That’s why it was art.”

I did not realize at that time that when you plant seeds, you also get roots.

There’s something to be said for being someone’s safety zone. Even if, sometimes, it means a kick or a punch or a rush of angry words.

I wonder if this is the reason Meret has been pushing me away, and then pulling me back, as if she can’t decide between the two extremes. Is she so scared of losing me that she thinks letting go would be less painful?

I do trust him, I realize. I trust him to take care of me. I always have.

The thing about death is that we’re all terrified of it happening, and we’re devastated when it does, and we go out of our way to pretend that neither of these things is true.

His eyes were the sea. This is how people drown, I thought.

We moved together, a chord of music I could never sing out loud, but would never stop hearing. Somewhere in time, others drank and danced. A star flashed green on the horizon. We were ancient.

“I’m thinking that I came to the desert with a lioness,” Wyatt said softly, “and ended up with a goddess in my arms.”

This is my favorite passage from the book.

Don’t forget: No one knows what to say to someone who’s dying. Everyone is afraid of saying the wrong thing. It’s more important to be there than to be right.

When you look at someone whose life has just ended, you don’t see horror or pain or fear. You see peace. Not just because the muscles relax and the breath has left—but because there’s a deep satisfaction, a conclusion. It never fails to move me, what a privilege it is to be at this moment, to be the bearer of their story.

“When you’re an artist,” Win says, “it’s because there’s something inside you that you can’t keep from spilling out. Maybe it comes in the form of sentences, or a grand jeté, or a stroke of a paintbrush. The end result can be a million different things. But the seed, it’s always the same. It’s the emotion there isn’t a word for. The feeling that’s too big for your body. To show someone your soul, you have to bleed.

It wasn’t just art. It wasn’t measured or literal. It was like being a medium, and having spirit pour out of you.

So this is what it feels like, a reckoning. When you have to push at the scar you try to keep hidden under scarves and coats and layers, and in doing so, you remember exactly what it felt like at the moment of injury. I feel gently along the fissure, the crack that separated my life from what I thought it would be to what it would become. What if, what if, what if.

I face him, staring into those bright blue eyes that have always been the pilot light inside me. “I couldn’t.”

“Dawn. If it will make you feel better, I could show you my appendix scar, and where I think I’m going bald, and you could point out your stretch marks and wrinkles. But I’d much rather pay attention to all the bits of you that are glorious.”

Emotional tears, for example, have protein-based hormones in them, including a neurotransmitter called leucine-enkephalin, which is a natural painkiller.

If you don’t tell a man that you came to him with a missing piece, he will never know to look for it.

“So you came here to hurt Wyatt?” “No,” I say immediately. “Why would you think that?” “Because why else would you remind him he loves you, and then leave him. Again.”

“I don’t know you. I don’t know what you’ve been doing all this time. But I’ve seen how you finish his sentences, and how he knows what you’re about to say before you say it: like you’re twins with a secret language. I see the way you look at each other—not like you want to get under each other’s clothes, but like you want to get under each other’s skin. I think it’s really pretty simple, Dawn: who do you want with you, when your time runs out?”

How, when he held my hand, I didn’t just feel things. I felt everything. He wasn’t staid and slow. He was steady. When I stopped careening between the highs and lows of emotion, I didn’t feel bored. I felt safe.

I didn’t want to be a cliché and I didn’t want you to be one either. But mostly, I didn’t want to be the one left behind, and the only way to ensure that is to be the one who leaves.

ONCE UPON A time, there is nothing but darkness. You stumble around blindly, so close to the edge that you are sure you’ll tumble over it, and if you are going to be honest, you must admit you are so low already you don’t necessarily think that would be a bad thing. Then one day, you meet someone. He finds you kneeling right at the precipice and instead of telling you to get back up, he kneels next to you. He tries to see what you are seeing. He doesn’t ask anything of you, or beg you to snap out of it, or remind you that there are people who need you. He just waits until you turn and squint and think to yourself: Oh, yes, I remember. This is what light looks like.

My world narrows down to those fierce blue eyes, which have criticized me, challenged me, surprised me, seduced me, loved me.

Because, I realize, getting what you want isn’t instant gratification. It’s a slow pulling apart, a realignment of bones and sinew. There are aches involved. There is bruising.

How do you undo intimacy? How do you go back to being acquaintances, when the other person knows every inch and groove of you, every irrational fear, every trigger?

One love that sends you into orbit…and then another that guides you home?”

You give someone your vulnerable, unshelled heart wrapped in a question: What will you do with it?