Mom is Just a Nickname

Very few books, movies or anything make me cry. There is one topic -death and family responding to death – that will always make me cry.

When I was a teenager, I had yet to find a movie that would make me cry. Then, one day, I watched My Girl. The movie where the little boy dies from bee stings? (sorry if I just ruined it for you…it’s such an old movie, I figure most have seen it by now!) That one made me sob hysterically. Looking back, it almost seems prophetic that the one movie I’d seen that triggered a powerful emotional response was one in which a family and their friends must handle the death of a child.

Yesterday, I read a book called Necessary Arrangementsby Tanya Michna. Basically it juxtaposes the stories of two close and loving sisters. One is getting married, and one has cancer. I literally cried through the entire book. I found it poignant, realistic, and heartbreaking while still being uplifting at the end.

“Don’t let them give up family traditions. If they stop doing the stuff we all did together, if–”

If the customs the four of them had shared disappeared, it would be as if Asia had disappeared. Not just from their active lives, but from their shared memories, their collective love for her. No, they’d always love her, but it was disconcerting to think that one day they might possibly get used to being without her.

Paragraphs like that run throughout the book. They bring to mind the things that have plagued my mind since Sullivan’s death. Sadness that he’d be forgotten, hurt that lives would, could and should move on away from his life, and the ways that relationships change in the wake of a death.

Although I have not lost an immediate family member to cancer, I can relate with the long, drawn out fight, with the constant medical attention, with the array of emotions present, and with the decision that must be made between treating a fatal illness in order to buy more time or treating the symptoms to make the time available worth living. I can relate to the feelings of the family facing the loss of a loved one. So many of the things in the book were from different perspectives than I’ve experienced, but I could so easily step into their shoes and feel what they were going through.

Between the excellent flow of the writing, and my own experiences with prolonged illness and death, this book struck a very deep chord with me.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 27th, 2008 at 5:23 pm and is filed under book, death, grief, Sullivan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.