Some Thoughts on Books

 A third essay I admire is by Amy Bloom; it's about coping. It starts with a bang.

“I cannot take all of these losses,” I said to my therapist, The Great Wayne, as I lay down, sniffling on his absurdly proto-Freudian Peruvian rug-covered couch.

Bloom immediately "recruits" you to her team via self-mockery. Sniffling, hyperbole. She is not going to flatter herself.

I had a list of large and small losses: my parents (whom I miss every day, but orphaned at 55 does not feel like someone has done me wrong); my old house (which I miss only at the holidays when my new house is an exploding clown car of children and grandkids); my perfect, helpful and unintrusive nextdoor neighbour who moved away suddenly, replaced by someone who is none of the above; my older sister, hospitalised twice; and, more than all of these, my husband, Brian, my constant companion and best beloved, who had been gone from me and from this world for a month. Brian was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease at 65, and, having seen its ravages in his own family and witnessed his own decline, he was determined not to make what he called “the long goodbye.” I supported and helped and wept, every day, while he arranged for his own peaceful and painless assisted suicide at Dignitas, in Switzerland.

What I like very much is how form matches content. This person really has endured loss. The list--which almost seems like a run-on sentence--reproduces the feeling of having been overwhelmed. Syntax conveys, or underlines, an emotion.

I flip over on the couch, to look at Wayne, hopefully. He is very old, quietly kind and nobody’s fool. He wears monstrous orthopedic shoes, has the eyebrows of Robert Morley and gets in and out of his armchair with hydraulic assistance. Wayne glances at me.

“You cannot take all of these losses,” he says. He laughs out loud. “Buckle up, kid. It only gets worse.”

Here is the stinger--both surprising and inevitable. If the narrator herself is a memorable character--observant, self-parodying, lost in a sea of chaos--then the *teacher* is also a standout. He is willing to toss "the rulebook" aside.

I'm ready to follow these two wherever they'd like to go. It's the monstrous orthopedic shoes that help to seal the deal.