I read this book a few years ago, but I’d read it again tomorrow. I’m sure I was crying in the first few pages, while holding this book closer and closer to my face as a way to burn the words into my brain. I don’t actually want to read it again, because to do so, would be to have to gear up for it, in all its gut ripping, sad, untimely beauty.
I don’t know how to express what this girl means to me. We’ve been together for eighteen years. Married for fourteen. All but two of that was just us two together. We’ve been all over the map emotionally, days when we stalked around looking for opportunities to smash a bottle over the other one’s head, and day, many more of them, when the anticipation of getting home to see her was almost more than I could stand. There’s almost nothing she doesn’t know about me, and she loves me even so. She’s as determined and hardheaded as a safe full of rocks, and she makes me nuts hourly. And she’s touched my heart and brought me to astonished, joyous tears so many times I can no longer count them. Every Christmas, every birthday, while I flounder in a sea of incompetent, inconsequential last-minute shopping, hoping to find something that might possibly interest her, she staggers me every time with some perfect, deeply considered, inventive gift. She pops my every bubble of pomposity, but nine times out of ten, she makes me laugh when she does so. She needs way too much affirmation and approval from others, but she gets it and deserves it. She’s as sexy and flirtatious as the day we met and if she did again what she did that day, I’d chase her down the street one more time.
Jim Beaver is a writer. He should hang up his acting hat, and just focus on pen as sword. Although I’ve never seen his acting, or Deadwood, so if he’s equally talented at that, well, life is unfair. This book is about cancer, and a kid with a disability. At the same time, and all bound up together. It’s a walking cliche, but there is absolutely nothing cliche about this book or its subjects because of the the way the author presents it. Beaver chronicles his wife’s stage 4 cancer diagnosis in the form of daily e-mails that he vets out to close friends and family. It’s clear that he writes as a means to grab onto sanity, as he is given the news of his young daughter’s autism diagnosis, just as his wife is beginning the fight for her life. It’s grave stuff. But, the writing…
It’s dispensed daily, intimately, and with small details carefully distilled, the lot of which, unintentionally creates a character study, not of the people being written about, but the author himself. He feels everything, every caring gesture from friends and family, every sick visit and offer of babysitting. He gives thanks and gratitude in every e-mail for his wife and child, but also for all the people around him that hold him aloft through crisis and crusade.
Stephanie Shaye was our utility gofer today. She wasn’t asked to do anything, but on the phone Cec mentioned not knowing what time it was because there isn’t a clock anywhere in sight of her hospital bed. Steph drove over from West Hills, a good twelve to fifteen miles, to drop off a clock she’d bought which clips onto the side rail of the bed. How in the world can anything bad happen anywhere if there are this many good and kind people around?
If you didn’t know much about cancer, you’ll be told every detail of the grim realities of battling metastatic lung cancer and its ravages. Cancer is a plague that keeps its victim hopeful, grateful, evaluative. Sometimes when its killed, it leaves its patient in a better place—more evolved, heightened, bold. When it kills, it defies the law of hope and only leaves bereavement in its wake. Reading this book is like feeling both of these outcomes, though only one presents itself.
If Mr. Beaver is as beautiful a soul as he appears in this book, I have no doubt, many a middle-aged suitor would offer themselves up at his doorstep. At the time of its publication, several years after his wife’s death, he had no interest in kindling the fires of new love. But I would bet money that anyone who feels as much as he feels for people, would find love in some form again, though maybe in a different shape than before. You hope that for him, in the end.
It’s bold to put a book in your top ten. Especially if its not Anna Karenina, The Grapes of Wrath or some other classic that looks good on your checklist. This is a memoir about cancer and its aftermath, from a man who loved his wife. I would usually reserve my top 10 for authors like Michael Ondaantje or Jhumpa Lahiri. This book is in my top five.