Category Archives: Death

Earth’s the Right Place for Love by Elizabeth Berg

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I fell in love with Elizabeth Berg when I saw her title “The Day I Ate Anything I Wanted,” and each of her subsequent books have given me a level of comfort. This one – Earth’s the Right Place for Love – made me cry. If you remember Arthur as the old man in Berg’s novel “The Story of Arthur Trulove,” you might appreciate the prequel in Berg’s latest novel but the story stands on its own as a lesson in grief and moving on.

Arthur is an inexperienced sixteen year old in unrequited love with the beautiful brunette who eventually becomes his wife. A horrific accident irrevocably changes Arthur’s life but cements his kind and determined outlook on life.

Although there’s no way to know what life will bring, Berg uses her characters to keep readers open to possibilities, and promises all will be well, if we can just be patient.

Flight

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Lynn Steger Strong’s Flight centers around a family gathering for the first Chirstmas after the matriarch Helen dies. Maybe it would have been better to read the story around the holidays after watching Home Alone, or maybe the misbegotten grief seemed artificial after having recently experienced it. I read through the book in a couple of days, but was left feeling empty at the end.

The three adult siblings, Martin, Henry, and Kate descend on a house in upstate New York to reconstruct a Christmas that will never be the same since their mother has recently died. Her recipes, her family games, her words of wisdom – all haunt the narrative as they struggle to avoid the usual family squabbles and tension. Helen’s house in Florida provides the bone of contention. Martin, the eldest and a professor recently placed on leave for his inappropriate comments to a student, and his wife, a successful but driven lawyer, want to sell and split the profits. Henry, an artist with a surreal attachment to the environment, and his wife, a former artist but now social worker to pay the bills, want to donate the land to the adjacent national bird sanctuary, and Kate, the youngest, wants the house for herself and her family to live in. Somehow, they thought Christmas would bring them all together and they would more easily come to an agreement. You may wonder what they were thinking, but this is fiction.

Mixed in with the angst and family tension are Quinn, a twenty-three year old recovering drug addict, and her daughter Maddie, both under the care of social worker Alice, who has never been able to have children of her own. This is Alice’s house, and she is a good Auntie, entertaining her nephews and nieces, making gingerbread slabs, buying sleds, and yearning to be a good surrogate mother to Maddie.

The conversations among the adults are anxious and sometimes unnerving, as they try to navigate their own issues as well as their place in a family. Most of the novel has the aspect of a weekly TV series, plodding along with everyday minutia, until Quinn leaves her young daughter alone to go out for a beer, and Maddie goes missing. The overnight search in the snow and forest brings out more inner turmoil among the adults, until a supposedly happy ending brings Christmas mercifully to an end.

The book would certainly provide good fodder for discussion at a book club with its epic family saga vibe and the unique character development offering perspective into sibling rivalry and loyalty. Let me know what you think of it after you read it.

A Single Rose

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In a rare interview, French author Muriel Barbery explained her love of Kyoto – a love beautifully revealed in her latest book – A Single Rose. Barbery noted:

“…we have long been lovers of Japanese culture and since we moved to Kyoto, a town that we are head over heels in love with, our feelings for this country have been confirmed. Our fascination began mostly as an aesthetic one, and has remained so: we are fascinated by the ability to create pure beauty, at the same time refined and pure; the kind of thing you see in the slow, sweet sumptuousness of Ozu’s films, in the splendor of the Japanese gardens, in the discreet sophistication of ikebana … It has had us under its spell for over ten years. And we are still at the dawn of our discoveries … But what we also love about Japan, without negating its somber and terrible face, is its repertoire of behaviors: the subtle politesse, the sense of security that results from social solidarity, a very special form of candor, as well. We don’t know how long these things can resist the infernal spirals of the contemporary world, but for now they make life here incredibly sweet and civil.”

A Single Rose tells the story of forty- year old Rose, who travels from France to Kyoto for the reading of her estranged Japanese father’s will. The story reads like a meditation with descriptions of gardens and temples, interspersed with notes on culture and folklore. The plot is simple snd predictable, but Barbery’s strength is transporting each reader to his or her own reflective inner world.

A short but worthwhile read, the book offers some quiet solace in these times of turmoil and uncertainty.

Should We Stay or Should We Go

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At the beginning of the vaccine distribution, I was inordinately miffed at somehow being classified as too young to be vaccinated. Having overcome my umbrage, I found Lionel Shriver’s Should We Stay or Should We Go had me considering old age again. Although the author is 64, she uses 80 as the marker for the beginning of being “really old.”

When her father dies after a long and debilitating illness, Kay Wilkinson can’t cry; she is relieved. Determined to die with dignity, her husband Cyril makes a proposal. To spare themselves and their loved ones such a humiliating decline, they should agree to commit suicide together once they’ve both turned eighty – end it all before it gets any worse. A medical Doctor, Cyril has access to Seconal and neatly places the pills in a black box in the refrigerator, to be washed down with a good wine when the time comes.

Although the subject matter is morbid, Shriver uses Gallow’s humor to good advantage. I knew by page fifty there was not a simple solution to the dilemma of Kay and Cyril when the chapter title “The First Last Supper” promised more adventures to come. Shriver creates a parallel universe in alternate chapters, showing how their decision on that fateful birthday could resolve. If they cut their lives artificially short, what might they miss out on, or what horrors might they escape?

Shriver cleverly creates thirteen chapters of scenarios, including surviving cryogenics, being hit by a bus, using long-term health care to live at the London version of the Ritz old folks home, contrasted nicely with no health care and living on the government dole at a place right out of “Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” And she addresses the “five-minutes-to-12 syndrome” – the temptation to hang on until it’s too late, and lose the opportunity to decide anything. Sometimes it’s good to stay, sometimes it’s better to leave.

Some chapters have them leave; others have them stay, and Shriver, an American writer living in London conveniently connects the Leave or Stay to the Brexit vote. Later, the Covid pandemic shows them in two versions of lockdown, one in dire straits of near hunger and isolation, the other living so well they are reluctant to rejoin the fray after quarantine is lifted. Shriver also tackles the future of immigration and its unexpected effects on the old couple.

The topic is becoming popular: Roz Chast humorously addressed it in her New Yorker style cartoon book – Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant, and Derek Humphry’s 1991 self-published Final Exit: The Practicalities of Self-Deliverance and Assisted Suicide for the Dying, was on the New York Times bestseller list for over four months. Katie Engelhart’s 2021 book, The Inevitable, is about people determined to exercise control over their own deaths.

And yet, most of us will put up with anything rather than die. Shriver notes that most think “If they ever do die – not that most people believe in their heart of hearts that they ever will – they’ll be wise, warm, funny, and sound of mind until the very end, with doting friends and family gathered round.” But it doesn’t always work out that way.

My mother, who died at 94, after a life of never going to the hospital except to give birth, and 5 last days of slow decline, told me – “Noone wants to leave the party.” Shriver would caution – make sure there’s still a party.

At times disturbing and even gruesome, Shriver’s sardonic wit provided enough comic relief to keep me reading, and her ingenious possibilities kept me wondering what would come next.