All The Light We Cannot See (Book Review)

NaBloPoMo Day 7: Post the opening sentence of your favorite book. How long has this book been in your life?

 

"At dusk they pour from the sky."

 

So begins All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, as leaflets fall from airplanes to warn the inhabitants of St. Malo to depart the city in anticipation of the 1944 Allied attack that will set fire to this last German-occupied city on the edge of the sea.

 

This novel is, hands down, one of the best books I have ever read.  And I have read a lot of books.

 

When I made it the centerpiece of a sermon, I talked about how the sighted Werner, a young German boy, so smart, so gifted, is caught up in the Nazi war machine and cannot see, and then refuses to see, the truth of his life, while the blind French girl Marie-Laure sees with unflinching clarity. They are connected by a long-past history, which they discover during their brief encounter before the end of the war ~ a history which involves radio broadcasts, the orphaned Werner and his sister, and Marie-Laure's now-broken great-uncle and his brother, lost to another war. 

 

One of my friends, a science teacher, tells me that it's the radio waves that constitute the light we cannot see ~ something this non-scientist did not grasp at all. My friend says that it is all true: Werner sees but does not, Marie-Laure does not but does, and the radio waves light up the air across Europe, making death inevitable and life possible.

 

Each chapter is a brief vignette, boring through the characters and their lives to illuminate creativity, cowardice, expedience, and courage. People live, people die ~ in Germany, in Russia, in Poland, in France ~ and there is no discernible reason why one thing happens and another does not.  

 

The novel caused me to become interested in St. Malo (the fact that my son Josh had spent some time there ~ now a charming seaside city ~ with his French family when he was in high school made the events of the novel all the more poignant for me) and what happened to it when the Allies attacked, which was this:

I read this book at breakneck speed, so intent was I on putting it all together, and then re-read it very, very slowly, savoring each and every word.

 

This book came into my life only a couple of months ago.  Now that I've written about it, I think I'll start reading it again tonight.

Scout 'n Me

I haven't yet read Go Set a Watchman, although it's sitting on my ipad, and I don't know that I will.

All of the reasons pro and con have already been thoroughly digested and analyzed on every form of media outlet, and I don't have anything new to offer.

I just have Scout.  And me.

TKM was my first grown-up book.  I read it when I was ten and in fifth grade, mostly with the aid of a flashlight, in the event that one of the real grown-ups would get up in the night to go to the bathroom and see a sliver of light under my door.

I was mesmerized.  I did not know what the word "rape" meant and, when we discussed the book at dinner, my own father, who looks a great deal like Gregory Peck, did nothing to dissuade me from the notion that it meant a violent act by a man against a woman which was, for some reason unclear to me, more heinous that a man pummeling someone of his own gender.

I did not understand anything at all about racial tensions in the South, or anywhere else.  In my rural, all-white world, they were not discussed, at least not in my hearing.  Within the next few years that would change, and I would discover a depth of racism in the extended family of my own dead mother that left me as as stunned as a girl otherwise unexposed to much of the world could be, but at ten I did not understand.

What I did understand was Scout, and Jem, and Dill.

To the extent that TKM is a coming-of-age novel, it was ours.

I was Scout: motherless, feisty, disinterested in convention, absorbed in figuring out a world in which adults played significant but peripheral roles.

My step-brother, same age as me, was Jem: physically bolder and more adept, but still my partner in our age of discovery.

My younger biological brother was Dill: the face of daydreaming innocence in the wake of tragedy, easily overlooked by adults until suddenly and occasionally he wasn't.

The shack down the road was the Radley house, and the elderly owner's German shepherds, lolling in the sun as they stretched across the blacktop between us on our bikes and town with its dime store and ice cream, were our Boo.

The town, a couple of miles down that road, was our Maycomb.  Many of the adults who populate Scout's world were easily recognizable in ours.

I can't relate many of our stories, as they involve how country children with free reign and bicycles spent their time in the early 1960s , and we will probably carry them to our graves.

But I can say that the curiosity, and recklessness, and sometimes courage, and fierce loyalty evinced by the Finch children and their friend Dill were ours.

I'm not sure that, even all these decades later, Jean Louise will speak my story as Scout did.

Caleb's Crossing: A Novel (Book Review)

A week or so ago, I sought book recommendations on my FB page ~ looking, in particular, for books set on islands.

 

I haven't tried to discern the appeal that islands hold for me these days.  Something to do with isolation, distance, water, life on the periphery of the mainstream, mainland, main culture . . . it probably wouldn't take long to figure out, but I'm not in a particularly self-analytic frame of mind these days.  I'm content simply to read.

 

One of the books recommended by a couple of friends, and the first one I found at the library, is Caleb's Crossing by Geraldine Brooks.  What a marvel of a novel!

 

Set mostly on 17the century Martha's Vineyard, the novel relates the story of a small band of Puritan settlers, their interactions with the Wampanoags who already inhabit the island, and the journey of two of the young Wampanoag men to Harvard College, all through the eyes of Bethia Mayfield, daughter of the local minister.  Able to carve out some free time and space for herself as she approaches young womanhood, Bethia explores the island and befriends, and is befriended by, the boy-turning-man whom she names Caleb.  Their lives, and the lives of their families and communities, continue to be interlaced with one another in ways made realistic and, by turns, enchanting and heart-breaking, thanks to the skillful pen of Geraldine Brooks.

 

Caleb, based on a historical figure of whom little is known, is brought to life in a vivid portrait of Native American skills and values little understood or appreciated by the Puritan interlopers, and Bethia, an entirely fictional character, is equally well drawn as a devout Calvinist torn between the world in which she has been raised and the one with which she feels a strong kinship.  The "crossing" in the title refers most obviously to Caleb's crossing from his Wampanoag life to his life as a student at Harvard, the crown of learning in the world "New" to the Puritan settlers ~ but many other crossings emerge, from literal and treacherous crossings across Nantucket Sound and Massachusetts Bay to the metaphorical crossings that each of the major characters experience as they traverse the precarious boundaries between cultural and gender norms.

 

As someone whose ancestral names can be found in the records of Nantucket, neighboring island to Martha's Vineyard, and as someone who spent two summers on Cape Cod and read a great deal about New England during my school years in Massachusetts and Rhode Ialand ~ and who, like Bethia Mayfield, was delighted to discover the poet Anne Bradstreet when I was a young woman myself ~ Caleb's Crossing was of particular interest to me.  But I think it would be an intriguing, even page-turning, read for anyone ~ one of those books you can hardly bear to see end.

Journeys of Simplicity ~ Book Contemplation

 

My friend Michelle sent me this beautiful little book which arrived yesterday afternoon, a delightful compendium of short bios and, on the facing pages, quotes from a range of writers and others about the "things they carried" on their journeys.  Some of them I am familiar with, some not at all.  It reminds me of Tim O'Brien's Vietnam book and essay of the same name, The Things They Carried, which I once used as the jumping off point for a blog post on the things we carry in grief  ~ things being less tangible than not.

You might see the humor in Thoreau's (he of Walden Pond simplicity ~ of sorts) list for a 12-day canoe trip into the Maine woods: 166 pounds of stuff, "enough to nearly swamp the canoe when they launched it."

My favorites so far:

For Basho's Great Walk, Basho being a 17th century Buddhist wanderer and poet, a short list of items, ending with

"discomfort and vexation
all the way"

and also

a list of the contents of Father Zossima's cell (from The Brothers Karamazov),

Bilbo's list of what he takes as he sets out for a walk, including what he forgets,

and the "Baggage for the Arctic Tern's 22,000 Mile Migration."  The facing page is empty.

Quite a wonderful little book.

Lifetime Books

There's been a question making the FB rounds ~ something about books that have had an impact in your life, books you can't forget.  Here's my list, with a few annotations

 

1. To Kill a Mockingbird: My first adult book, in fifth grade.  I'm sure I've read it at least 50 times. 

2. Night: I don't know when I first read this, but I've taught it a few times.

 
3. Hamlet: I think I saw my first Hamlet production, believe it or not, in a Royal Shakespeare Company performance at Stratford-upon-Avon when I was in junior high. 

 4. Macbeth: Junior year high school English ~ big paper on Lady M.

 5. Poems of Emily Dickinson:  When I was a senior in high school, I did an independent study one quarter on mysticism in the poetry of ED.  I didn't think there was much chance of there being a God, but I guess that's never stopped me from pursuing the possibility. 

 6. Poems of T.S. Eliot: Another major feature of my junior year of high school.

 7. Dante's Inferno: I took a college course on Dante, in English in the Italian Department.  I don't think we ever got out of the Inferno.  I'd been waiting for that one since being introduced to it via Eliot (see above).

 8. By the Shores of Silver Lake: I inhaled the Little House books as a child.  I think the later ones made the biggest impression on me.  When we were high school seniors, a friend and I re-read them all, and we would pretend to be  Laura and Mary out there on the Dakota prairie during our nighttime winter walks between our dorm and the library, when the air was frigid and the snow high in the Connecticut Valley of western Massachusetts.

 9. The Secret Garden: I've written about this one before, along with Heidi: Those wonderful childhood books in which motherless heroines prevail and, in the case of Mary Lennox, create something beautiful.  My kind of girls.

 10. The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius:  Ten years since I first caught a whiff of these.  How I learned to pray.

 11. The Little Prince:   A children's book for adult readers.  The fox and the sunsets. 

 

Now that I think of it, I believe that all of this writing is connected. 

 

Despite my best efforts to the contrary, there are hundreds and hundreds of books in this house, and Kindle is not helping.  But I suppose that I could make do with the above plus a Bible on my proverbial desert island.

 

 

 

Not Exactly Fairy Tales

 

I've been re-reading  Margaret Silf's book Inner Compass, a gentle, hands-on introduction to Ignatian spirituality.  No jargon, but many exercises to help a reader sort through her spiritual life with the creativity and focus that the Spiritual Exercises encourage.

 

One of her suggestions is to recall your favorite fairy stories and use them as you might a Gospel contemplation: ponder, ruminate, explore, wonder, seek.

They aren't fairy tales, but the two childhood books that came immediately to mind for me were Heidi and The Secret Garden.  I was probably about eight when I discovered them, and I know that I re-read them several times over the next few years.

 

At eight or nine, I would not have seen what I realized immediately last night: Girls without parents, thrust into worlds in which they had to depend largely upon their own wits and determination for their emotional survival.  Girls whose inventiveness enabled them to triumph.  Girls who found beauty in nature even as they were surrounded by angry, withdrawn, grieving adults who were themselves struggling to surmount terrible losses.

A few years ago my daughter asked me why I had studied literature rather than psychology in college.  I responded that I had addressed exactly that dilemma all those years ago, and concluded that they were essentially the same major, but that one told stories in the form of technical terms, experiments and graphs, and the other in the form of imagery, metaphor, and textured words. 

These days, a little girl such as the one I was would acquire a therapist and a support group ~ all to the good, I'm sure.  But I hope that someone would also hand her novels with characters who might become her best friends and guides through the treachery of a motherless childhood. 

Not a Silent Retreat!

 

 

We met six years ago as would-be spiritual directors on the first night of our training program, which began with a week-end retreat.  We finished up two years later at another retreat, and with four other members of our class formed a peer supervision group ~ which means that we meet every month or so for conversation around our experiences as spiritual directors.  Some time ago, three of us realized that we would all be turning sixty this year, and this week-end we managed to pull off a mini-retreat as a way of being intentional about the "final third" of our lives.

The three of us: Two Catholics and one Protestant, two employed in church positions and one doing major volunteer work related to spiritual direction, two married and one single, six children, work experience including missionary in El Salvador, teacher, lawyer, pastor, psychiatric nurse, and diocesan staff for pastoral ministry ~ and spiritual direction, of course.

We spent a very small amount of time each of us on her own; mostly we talked.  And talked and talked and talked.  A few hours Friday night and nonstop from breakfast through lunch today.  (We never left the dining room ~ midmorning, one of the staff members at the retreat house stopped in to ask if we knew that lunch wouldn't be served until 12:15!) 

We used Paula Huston's book A Season of Mystery: Twelve Spiritual Practices for Embracing a Happier Second Half of Life, which provided a great springboard for conversation.  I think we all agreed that it was particularly relevant to the third third of life; we found the topics pertinent and helpful and challenging.  I would highly recommend the book to any group of people seeking to look reflectively and unflinchingly at these final decades and to approach them as a time in which to live prayerfully and authentically.

We didn't think to take a picture!  But here's where we went.


 

Reading and Watching Mysteries

Mireille Enos as Sarah Linden in The Killing

I don't, actually, read or view mysteries on a regular basis.  Almost never, in fact.

 

The fact that I've just finished reading one, am almost through a second, and am even watching a third on television tells you that life is pressing in on me.  Two many decisions hanging in the summer wind, too many moments in which I'm thinking, "Just blew that one," and too much clutter in my household.  My response: Burrow in with something absorbing but entirely nondemanding.  I don't even attempt to keep track of most of the characters beyond the main protagonists.  Here's what I've been up to:

 

The Fallen Angel by Daniel Silva.  Gabriel Allon, brilliant restoration artist, always up to his neck in religious Renaissance paintings and, by the way, also master Israeli spy and assassin, confidant of popes and secular government officials, happily married man whose psyche is marred by the murders (car bomb) of his first wife and son, is the hero of a series of Silva novels.  Since his work in both the artistic and surveillance arenas so often takes him to the Vatican, other main characters often include devastatingly handsome priests with tortured pasts and lovers with whom they are entangled for life, and Italian women of astonishing beauty and professional acumen, often the former lovers of said priests.  In this particular novel, the lady in question is married to the mastermind of a Vatican banking scandal (sound familiar?) unraveling at the hands of the priest hero with the assistance of his friend Allon.   These novels are great fun ~ although, having heard Daniel Silva interviewed in NPR a couple of weeks ago, I decided to purchase his new one and discovered that I can only take so much Gabriel Allon at a time.  Therefore, I'm now reading . . .

 

Faye Kellerman's Hangman.  In Kellerman's series, Peter Decker is the Los Angeles homicide detective and Rina Lazarus is his beautiful Orthodox Jewish wife.  I'd long since forgotten how the two of them got together ~ so I've just looked it up. There've been nineteen novels in the series, and the couple met in the first, when Decker was investigating a rape in a yeshiva community where Rina, a widowed mother, ran the mikvah.  The Ritual Bath gives her an opportunity to explain her religious customs and the two of them a window of time in which to fall madly in love.  Naturally, I enjoy the combination of religion, crime, and family as I do in the Silva novels.  Here, the added bonus is that, having spent those six years teaching in an Orthodox school, the small details of Jewish life jump out at me and ring entirely true, and having a complicated family of origin of my own, the Decker-Lazarus combination of adults and children is intriguing.

 

Finally, my son Matt and I have become obsessed with the third season of The Killing, an AMC drama.  The first two seasons focused on the murder of one teenaged girl in Seattle, reaching an entirely unsatisfactory conclusion.  I swore that I would not get involved again ~ this year's combination of the gray and rain of Seattle with the lives of homeless teenagers being picked off one-by-one at the hands of a serial killer, and Detective Sarah Linden's unsuccessful, as of last Sunday, attempt to save the life of the man condemned to death as the result of a previous investigation of hers, was more than I wanted to stomach.  However . . .  my son was watching and I found myself drawn in the again, by the utter brokenness of both Sarah and her partner Stephen Holder, and by their intertwined search for redemption as they seek to carve a modicum of justice out of impossibly brutal situations.  So far, with one episode left, Sarah is in some ways responsible for the execution of a man innocent of at least the particular crime for which he dies,  and Holder for the death of a homeless girl ~ and it is apparent that the man finally in custody, to the relief of the police department and the entire city of Seattle, is not, in fact, the killer.

 

All stories of mayhem and murder, all absorbing, and The Killing beautifully filmed and acted. If you need a break from the intensity of your own life,  immerse yourself in someone else's!

 

 

 

Books Books Books

I am in need of some solid and distracting reading and I asked for suggestions on FB ~ nothing trashy, but not W&P either.  And with the locale as pretty much a character.  In the time it took me to take a shower . . .  Voila'!

In case you need some ideas yourselves:

Ragtime is always one of my favorites

 

Molokai by Alan Brenneer. State of Wonder by Ann Patchett.

 

Robin Craig Feel free to elaborate, folks.

 

'the gift of rain' by tan twan eng. it was short listed for the man booker prize and it's so beautiful and wonderful. you will absolutely love it.

 

In This House of Brede

 

 I enjoyed Molokai as well. I hear The Paris Wife is really good, haven't gotten round to reading it yet. But Hemingway and Paris--during the happiest time of his life-- have got to be magical.

 

The Art of Racing in the Rain or anything by Pat Conroy! Straight Man was awesome as well!

 

If you haven't read it yet, you really want to read: "The Art of Racing in the Rain" by Garth Stein ... takes place in Seattle ... haven't read a better book (check out reviews on Amazon)

 

I agree with State of Wonder, Ann Patchett's latest - haven't read any Rumer Goden in years, but loved In This House of Brede when I read it. Love everything of hers. I just finished The Last Runaway by Tracy Chevalier, which is set in Ohio, and is about the Underground Railway. Louise Erdrich's latest is an amazing piece of work, The Round House. A difficult book, but I couldn't put it down. I recently read JK Rowling's first adult novel, A Casual Vacancy - which I also couldn't put down, though I hated much about it. It is sort of the Anti-Harry Potter. The Tiger's Wife was wonderful - the location is almost the best part, Tea Obrecht. Maybe I'll send more later - don't want to overwhelm you

 
Another one I enjoyed is Marcus Borg's first noveil: "Putting Away Childish Things" ... I really resonated with the main character ... light reading, in a way, but every line filled with a theological depth that made it a nourishing read for me

 

Maisie Dobbs series....mysteries set in England in the early 1900's with a female investigator who is trained in meditation....and who always desires reconciliation as part of her agreement with clients regardless of the result of her investigation.Or mysteries by Laurie King (which I have not read but apparently are really good) or for really light weight but good, the China Bayles series by Susan Wittig Albert.

 

Julie Otsuka's two novels about the Japanese in California during WW II: When The Emperor Was Divine and The Buddha in the Attic, are two of the best novels I've read in the past year. And I read a LOT of novels.

 

 Laurie King has two series, one of which I have read, the other not. The one I have read features a lesbian detective in San Francisco, and is really gripping - the other stars a woman (whose name I forget) who works with Sherlock Holmes. So, Victorian London.

 

 Molokai is about a young girl sent to a leper colony in Hawaii. Not as depressing as you might think. State of Wonder is about a medical researcher who goes to Brazil to find the truth about her colleague who died in the jungle while visiting another doctor researching a new fertility drug for their company. Interesting ethical issues and fascinating setting.

 If you don't mind old-fashioned, I love the Jalna novels by Mazo de la Roche. :) Multi-generational family saga in Canada.

 

Anything by Diana Abu Jaber. Except Origins. Shall I stop?

 

Have you read anything by Susan Howatch? I love her!

A favorite series of mine (if you like mysteries, and the medieval world, you may like it too) is by Margaret Frazer - featuring a nun who is Chaucer's niece, and her monastic world. Lovely. I need to go see if she has any new ones I haven't read. She has a couple of medieval series, but Dame Frevisse is my true love!

 

Maisie Dobbs --definitely!!!

 

Caleb's Crossing, by Geraldine Brooks. About the first Native American to go to Harvard - very New England, very very very good.

 

Laurie King books are great! I'm enjoying "the game" right now!

Cutting for Stone

 

Cutting for Stone and Molokaii were both excellent. Just finished Once We Were Brothers--very good. Currently reading "The End of Your Life Book Club"--not as depressing as the title sounds.

 

Robin Craig Oh, you guys are great! Unfortunately Brede is not on Kindle. And KGB, I have devoured almost everything by Susan Howatch. And MES, I have almost all of the Frazer books. (Do you know that "Margaret Frazer" is really two women?)

All of Gerealdine Brooks' books are good - "People of the Book", "A Year of Wonder" and "Caleb's Crossing" - all fabulous.

*****

Do I know the coolest people or what?

I now need to get into bed with my fleece blankee and reeeeeeeead . . . .

 

 

Book Clubs

Two of them.

The more recently inaugurated is virtual.  We meet on google hangout, a group of women whose expressions of faith vary but whose commitments are solid.  We pray together and we talk for an hour, intently and with few detours, about different topics each month.  We don't have to concern ourselves with food or clean houses, and we all love what we are reading.  It's not a conflicted experience for me.

The other was initiated by a few of my close friends in the months after the deaths of Musical Friend's husband and of  my son.  Neither she nor I went for a long time, not until after we were told that the book club had been started "for us."  We were both baffled; she doesn't read for pleasure, and I was finding group activity of any kind to be painfully bewildering.  We weren't, either one of us, exactly book club material.

Actually, the part about not going is not entirely true.  I did go to the latter book club a few months after Josh died.  The book under discussion was a local author's story of her home's renovation, a subject dear to the hearts of those of us who live in  big old homes built more than ninety years ago.  I mentioned that I wanted to burn my home to the ground; it was so filled with memories of our children that I could hardly stand to be there.  Now THAT statement brought discussion to a halt.  Oh, I thought to myself.  They thought we were talking about new kitchens and I thought we were talking about dead children.  I realized that I had no business going out in public.

Well, that evening took place three and one-half years ago, and this week I am finally hosting the book club for the first time.  It's not so much a book club as a social occasion; it seems to me that there's a lot of competition for the best spread of food and wine.  My friends are excellent cooks and bakers.  I am neither, so Thursday will be an expensive day for me, as I seek to purchase what other women know how to prepare.

The irony is that we're reading (my choice this month) Sara Miles's Take This Bread.  Although I don't cook anything much beyond grilled cheese, her subject ~ the transformation wrought in individuals and communities nourished by the Eucharist ~ is dear to my heart.

The last time in my memory that we had a genuine book discussion  was some considerable time ago, when Musical Friend was the hostess and the book was Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, about the first year of her life after the death of her husband.  Musical Friend wanted desperately to share her experience of having been catapulted into sudden widowhood at a young age with her friends.  Some of the women were unhappy with her choice and its failure to provide an upbeat ending, but we engaged in a probing discussion for two hours.

I wonder whether I dare aim for the the same thing when the topic addresses the brokenness and possibilities for openness of the church?

Ignatian Spirtual Adventure - Reflection 7

Oh, yes, we are supposed to be praying our way through the life of Jesus for these couple of weeks.  But I find myself completely arrested by the life of Mary.

An intriguing confluence of events:

I had begun to wonder where it is that I find parallels between the Biblical narrative and my own.  In the past, I have turned to the Woman at the Well and to Mary Magdalene.  In fact, the story of the former was the theme narration for my ordination service, a sort of Ignatian repetition of a significant week of prayer for me during my experience of the Exercises six years ago.  But now, a dramatic six month period in my life just behind me, I am feeling less than satisfied with my sense of the confluence between those stories and my own.

An email flyer announced the release of a new series of presentations by a Jesuit friend-director-counselor-guide entitled, of all things, Every Life Has a Story.  Hmmm . . . .  (It looks excellent and no, you don't have to be Catholic.)

I had just turned to a small book, The Reed of God, that said Jesuit had recommended to me six years ago.  At the time, I wasn't much impressed, and we moved on.  What was I thinking ????  Oh, well.  Sometimes the gifts and resources that come your way are for the future.

Here's what I'm thinking now, sort of.  I like the Woman at the Well and Mary Magdalene because I see in my own life something of the transformation that occurred in theirs.  A before and an after.

But these days, I am slowly coming to terms with what seems to be another hallmark of my own story: constant tension between differing poles.  A call to live in ambiguity.  

To live at home and away from home.

Not to have a mother but to be a mother.

To be a mother but to lose a child.  

To be "thoroughly Protestant" (as Kathleen Norris describes herself) but deeply appreciative of Catholicism.

To be thoroughly Christian and yet expansively generous toward other faiths of the world.  

To be an outgoing congregational pastor and a quiet spiritual companion.
Added later:  How could I forget?  I pastor a church that is BOTH Presbyterian and Methodist!

There's a certain, generally-ignored corner of my psyche that longs to be either-or.  I don't tend to that corner, because I don't consider it to be of much value, but it's there.  Sometimes it catches my eye, looking for all the world like a safe and easy place.  But I know it's not.

I'm beginning to see Mary as someone who also walked in ambiguity.  We are accustomed to hearing her "Yes" as a confident, unequivocal assertion of vocation, and I'm not disputing that.  But her life was a good deal more complex as a consequence of her "Yes."

I'm beginning to see her story as the one I want to comprehend.

Image: Detail of Pieta, Jose' de Robera, 1637.

Because of Katie (Book Review)

Katie Gerstenberger died at twelve from a particularly vicious form of cancer (I know; is there any other kind?) that moved with speed and in silence to strangle her internal organs before offering only the subtlest hints of its presence.  

I don't remember how I "met" Katie's mother Karen.  It happened sometime during that fog of the first couple of years after Josh's death, when I was searching for  . . .  well, I have no idea what I was searching for online, but among my discoveries were other mothers, other women whose lives had been transported to that other place where children die.  I suppose we all live in a Madeleine L'Engle novel, and not a very good one at that.

At some point, four of us connected in a particular way, and spent months together writing our way through a "retreat" with Joyce Rupp's book, Open the Door.  By that time, our children had been gone for awhile, and we had each reached a point at which we wanted to re-engage with the rest of the world.  Of the four of us, three had young adult children who had died suddenly, without warning: an unknown complication of an illness stalked a young man in the night, a rogue wave pulled a young woman out to sea, and depression claimed another young man, in the form of suicide.  Katie was by far the youngest of our children, and the only one to die after a lengthy illness.

Because of Katie chronicles the Gerstenberger family's experience with that illness, from the first hint that Katie was not bouncing back from what seemed to be some sort of childhood virus, through the terrifying testing and diagnosis, through the family move to the hospital, through Katie's return to home and hospice care, through her death.  Throughout the book, Karen offers commentary and suggestions that should be helpful to families and medical caregivers alike.  

I think that the book may prove particularly helpful to parents and older siblings caught in the same maelstrom of illness and procedures.  Karen describes the alarming disorientation of being sucked into the world of children's cancer and hospital life; in particular, the loss of privacy and the sudden appearance of an entire phalanx of personnel in her family's life, each representing a profession and set of responsibilities previously unknown to Katie's family.  Seattle Children's Hospital clearly represents a model of family centered care at its best.  The family is involved in every decision; parents are able to be present for every procedure.  School and tutoring options are available for patients and siblings alike ~ a semblance of normalcy and activity for those who as a family move far from home to access care for a child.  And yet . . .  some interactions go poorly.  And parents sometimes have to travel several floors to use the bathroom or take a shower!

Since the beginning of my breast cancer experience, I have realized anew how important it is to have a guide (or several) whose perspective mirrors your own.  I have learned a great deal about breast cancer from the doctors and nurses, of course, but none of them have provided much in the way of guidance about daily life and comfort.  That has all come from other women: from their books and phone calls and emails and blogs and, in the case of a couple of friends who are nurses, from their generous arrival on my doorstep to help with home care.  In the shocking world of children's cancer care, Karen Gerstenberger is such a guide.

No one would envy a mother whose child has died, but I think that in our little group of conversing mothers, the rest of us have envied Karen her time to care for Katie and to say good-bye.  What shines through this book, and is of far more importance than the medical detail (although I know that parents in similar situations will cling to that, and rightly so), is the closeness of the Gerstenberger family, a closeness forged in honesty and love as Katie's prognosis worsens.  Probably many of us have experienced that awful silence and isolation that accompanies serious illness and death; family and friends vanish into thin air, put off by the vehemence of our reactions, frightened by the physical realities, and afraid of doing or saying the wrong thing.  Karen's forthright approach to her daughter's final months will perhaps ease the way for others to know how to offer companionship to those in trouble.  And her honesty and compassion certainly serve as a model for other parents called to wade in these particularly deep waters alongside a beloved child.