Olive, Again (Olive Kitteridge, #2)

by Elizabeth Strout

Human beings are fundamentally lonely creatures, further isolated by the rigors of aging. Families are emotional minefields. Death, dementia and other natural disasters lurk everywhere. Love, though precious, is elusive, prone to slip away almost before we realize its existence. The darkness of Strout’s vision is leavened by her belief in moments of grace, which may arrive in a slant of light, a sudden insight, or (best of all) a connection to another human being.”

He understood that he was a seventy-four-year-old man who looks back at life

and marvels that it unfolded as it did, who feels unbearable regret for all the mistakes made. And then he thought: How does one live an honest life?

And then Olive suddenly thought how she had not been happy even before Henry had his stroke. Why this clarity came to her at that point she did not know. Her knowledge of this unhappiness came to her at times, but usually when she was alone.

think our job—maybe even our duty—is to—” Her voice became calm, adultlike. “To bear the burden of the mystery with as much grace as we can.”

Imagine at my age, starting over again.” Olive put the towel in her lap and raised one opened

hand slightly. “But it’s never starting over, Cindy, it’s just continuing on.”

Jack drank his whiskey quickly, sitting in his chair, because he was so frightened. What frightened him was how much of his life he had lived without knowing who he was or what he was doing. It caused him to feel an inner trembling, and he could not quite find the words—for himself—to even put it exactly as he sensed it. But he sensed that he had lived his life in a way that he had not known. This meant there had been a large blindspot directly in front of his eyes. It meant that he did not understand, not really at all, how others had perceived him. And it meant that he did not know how to perceive himself.

pictured his wife later, as she came to bed, her face lowered, but then the sudden open smile she might give him, and his heart felt a horrifying rush then, because he really had loved her in his way, and she was gone. But they had still squandered what they had, because they had not known.

“I’m scared.” Jim looked straight ahead as he said this. “Of what, Jimmy?” “Of dying.” Jim looked over at Bob, gave him his wry half-smile. “I’m scared to death of dying. I really am. I can feel it coming so fast—whoosh! Jesus, it all goes so fast these days. But you know what?”

“I don’t really care, either. I mean, about dying. It’s so strange, Bobby. Because on one hand I have these moments—or I had these moments before I got all doped up—of just sheer terror. Terror. And at the very same time, I kind of feel like, Yeah, okay, let’s go, I’m ready.”

it came to him then that it should never be taken lightly, the essential loneliness of people, that the choices they made to keep themselves from that gaping darkness

were choices that required respect:

“When you get old,” Olive told Andrea after the girl had walked away, “you become invisible. It’s just the truth. And yet it’s freeing in a way.”

Olive said, “I don’t think I can explain this well. But you go through life and you think you’re something. Not in a good way, and not in a bad way. But you think you are something. And then you see”—and Olive shrugged in the direction of the girl who had served the coffee—“that you no longer are anything. To a waitress with a huge hind end, you’ve become invisible. And it’s freeing.”

understood that this had to do with her, with Olive. She was going to die. It seemed extraordinary to her, amazing. She had never really believed it before.

it was almost over, after all, her life. It swelled behind her like a sardine fishing net, all sorts of useless seaweed and

broken bits of shells and the tiny, shining fish—all those hundreds of students she had taught, the girls and boys in high school she had passed in the corridor when she was a high school girl herself (many—most—would be dead by now), the billion streaks of emotion she’d had as she’d looked at sunrises, sunsets, the different hands...