My random thoughts on Jan, love, grief, life and all things considered.
I walk long distances alone, but I genuinely miss my walks with Jan. On the day we met, we walked several miles to acquaint ourselves with the person we loved.
Today, I remember the short, slow walks to Temple for the High Holidays and the lesson from the Baal Shem Tov that we read every year.
Your fellow human being is a mirror for you. If there is love and compassion in your soul, you will see the goodness in others.
I am and always will be surrouned by Jan’s love, compassion, and goodness every day of my life.
Tonight begins Yom Kippur. When Jan was alive, she often would tell me I shouldn’t fast as I was not born Jewish. However, I had fasted before I met her for various causes.
Would she be surprised that I am going to services every Friday night and the High Holidays?
I have committed to attending every Friday night service for the first year since her death, as Judaism is now my faith.
Both faith and rituals are important to me, and they help me on my journey of love as I sail from the Island of Grief back to the Community of Love.
Finding Peace, One Piece at a Time by Rachel Blythe Kodanaz is a book I wish I had long before Jan died. It provides helpful information that can help maintain an organized lifestyle as well as assist with the possessions of a loved one.
Recently, I have noticed that I devour my meals, even though I have never been a fan of fast food. I miss having my dear companion, Jan, by my side during mealtimes.
I rushed through my meals and cleaned up more efficiently without Jan. Unfortunately, I am left with nothing but the lonely hours of the night as my companion.
Eating alone makes me feel rushed and unfulfilled as if I am trying to finish my meal as quickly as possible without taking the time to savor it. Despite being able to care for myself, eating alone makes me uneasy.
The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Gifts made this month; I will match dollar-for-dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.
I receive a commission when you buy a book or product using a link on this page. Thank you for supporting Sharing Jan’s Love blog.
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by Rachel Blythe Kodanaz
Finding Peace, One Piece at a Time by Rachel Blythe Kodanaz is a book I wish I had long before Jan died. It provides helpful information that can help maintain an organized lifestyle and assist with the possessions of a loved one.
Having lost almost everything I had except for the clothes on my back after a house fire in 1972, I thought I had adopted a view that possessions were not significant. With Jan’s death, the truth is that she and I had collected essential possessions, and now it was my responsibility to decide what to do with them.
Rachel provides a comprehensive overview of the meaning of possessions and how to build a game plan to manage them. Chapter 3 focuses on Building Your Game Plan: The Ten Essentials and this covers all the crucial topics – triggers, building a team, and creating a timeline, among others.
Magic of the Six Piles is a well-designed plan that will help most of us confront the possessions of our loved ones. The piles are:
Having read the book, I need to move from pondering to action. This book will be by my side as I work to move my wife’s possessions into the six piles. Hopefully, it will also assist in reducing m possessions to make it easier for my sons.
Ms. Kodanaz has presented at my bereavement groups and has been an inspiration. She has encouraged me to journal and writes about my love for Jan.
by Amy Liptrot
The Outrun: A Memoir by Amy Liptrot is about her return to Orkney after more than a decade; she visits the Outrun on the sheep farm where she grew up. Approaching the land that was once home, memories of her childhood merge with the recent events that have set her on this journey. My current grief journey is not like Amy Liptrot‘s, but I learned from her struggles as we all need the support of family and friends.
Amy’s long walks, detailed description of bird watching, and life on a small island were very moving. I might have moved from one apartment to the adjacent one, but I learned from Amy’s journey and feel more confident facing life’s uncertainties.
I highly recommend this memoir.
The Goodreads summary provides an overview,
Amy was shaped by the cycle of the seasons, birth and death on the farm, and her father’s mental illness, which were as much a part of her childhood as the wild, carefree existence on Orkney. But as she grew up, she longed to leave this remote life. She moved to London and found herself in a hedonistic cycle. Unable to control her drinking, alcohol gradually took over. Now thirty, she finds herself washed up back home on Orkney, standing unstable at the cliff edge, trying to come to terms with what happened to her in London.
Spending early mornings swimming in the bracingly cold sea, the days tracking Orkney’s wildlife—puffins nesting on sea stacks, arctic terns swooping close enough to feel their wings—and nights searching the sky for the Merry Dancers, Amy slowly makes the journey toward recovery from addiction.
The Outrun is a beautiful, inspiring book about living on the edge, about the pull between island and city, and about the ability of the sea, the land, the wind, and the moon to restore life and renew hope.
The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Gifts made this month; I will match dollar-for-dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.
I receive a commission when you buy a book or product using a link on this page. Thank you for supporting Sharing Jan’s Love blog.
by Bonnie Blaylock
Light to the Hills: A Novel by Bonnie Blaylock is about Amanda Rye, a young widowed mother and traveling packhorse librarian who comes through a mountain community struck by the nation’s economic collapse in the 1930s. I recommend this page-turner as it highlights the importance of family and community. From this foundation, truth lights a path toward survival, mountain justice, forgiveness, and hope.
The novel was recommended by Olivia Hawker, bestselling author of The Fire and the Ore, who said, “Light to the Hills is a touching meditation on motherhood and the importance of community, especially during difficult times.”
Last year I read a modern tale about Appalachia, Demon Copperhead. Both are good novels but very different.
Light to the Hills was a feel-good read despite the problems faced by Ms. Rye and the MacInteer family. It was precisely the book I needed to read this week.
The Goodreads summary provides an overview,
The folks in the Kentucky Appalachians are scraping by. Coal mining and hardscrabble know-how are a way of life for these isolated people. But when Amanda Rye, a young widowed mother and traveling packhorse librarian, comes through a mountain community hit hard by the nation’s economic collapse, she brings with her hope, courage, and apple pie. Along the way, Amanda takes a shine to the MacInteer family, especially to the gentle Rai; her quick-study daughter, Sass; and Finn, the eldest son who’s easy to warm to. They remind Amanda of her childhood and her parents with whom she longs to be reconciled.
Her connection with the MacInteers deepens, and Amanda shares with them a dangerous secret from her past. When that secret catches up with Amanda in the present, she, Rai, Sass, and Finn find their lives intersecting—and threatened—in the most unexpected ways. Now they must come together as the truth lights a path toward survival, mountain justice, forgiveness, and hope.
The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Gifts made this month; I will match dollar-for-dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.
I receive a commission when you buy a book or product using a link on this page. Thank you for supporting Sharing Jan’s Love blog.
by Carol Berkin
A Sovereign People: The Crises of the 1790s and the Birth of American Nationalism by Carol Berkin, Presidential Professor American Colonial and Revolutionary History; Women’s History Professor at Baruch College, focuses on four crises in the first decade. Most historians view these are part of the early partisan debates in America.
Professor Berkin takes a different perspective. She focuses on how the Whiskey Rebellion, the Genet Affair, the XYZ Affair, and the Alien and Sedition Acts helped build nationalism. Despite the partisan divisions, both sides could find solutions that helped America survive its first decade. The failure to resolve anyone of these could have doomed America to failure.
The Federalists – Washington, Hamilton, and Adams – were the leaders of that first decade and managed the successive crisis of sovereignty.
A Sovereign People is one of four books from my first One Day University class.
by Mohsin Hamid
The Last White Man by Mohsin Hamid is a story of love, loss, and rediscovery in a time of unsettling change. One morning, Anders, the novel’s protagonist, wakes to find that his skin has turned dark, his reflection a stranger to him. At first, he tells only Oona, an old friend, newly a lover. Soon, reports of similar occurrences surface across the land.
In Mohsin Hamid’s “lyrical and urgent” prose (O Magazine), The Last White Man powerfully uplifts our capacity for empathy and the transcendence over bigotry, fear, and anger it can achieve.
I highly recommend this book. It was a page-turner that kept me thinking about love, loss, and rediscovery. All three are subjects close to my heart since Jan’s death.
I decided to read the book after hearing an interview with the author on All of It on WNYC.
One morning, Anders wakes to find that his skin has turned dark, his reflection a stranger to him. At first he tells only Oona, an old friend, newly a lover. Soon, reports of similar occurrences surface across the land. Some see in the transformations the long-dreaded overturning of an established order, to be resisted to a bitter end. In many, like Anders’s father and Oona’s mother, a sense of profound loss wars with profound love. As the bond between Anders and Oona deepens, change takes on a different shading: a chance to see one another, face to face, anew.
Hamid’s The Last White Man invites us to envision a future – our future – that dares to reimagine who we think we are, and how we might yet be together.
The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Gifts made this month; I will match dollar-for-dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.
I receive a commission when you buy a book or product using a link on this page. Thank you for supporting Sharing Jan’s Love blog.
by R.F. Kuang
I began reading Yellowface, a novel by R.F. Kuang, today. The storyline has been captivating as I scroll through the pages on my Kindle App. The book explores important themes such as cultural diversity, racism, the negative impact of cultural appropriation, and the alienation caused by social media. I find the protagonist, June Hayward, relatable and enjoyable to read about while experiencing Yellowface on my Kindle App.
June and Athena were both talented writers, but Athena’s success overshadowed June’s. After Athena’s sudden death, June rashly steals her completed manuscript, a groundbreaking novel about the Chinese laborers who contributed to World War I. June edits the book and takes credit for it, even going so far as to change her name and ethnicity for marketing purposes. She believes the story deserves to be told, regardless of who tells it.
As June’s book becomes a bestseller, she is haunted by the guilt of stealing Athena’s work. Her secret becomes harder to keep as evidence of her theft surfaces. June must confront her actions and decide how far she will go to protect her newfound success.
The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Gifts made this month; I will match dollar-for-dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.
I receive a commission when you buy a book or product using a link on this page. Thank you for supporting Sharing Jan’s Love blog.
by Jeanine Cummins
American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins is one of the best books I have read this year.
American Dirt is a “cross-genre novel that combines elements of a commercial thriller, literary fiction, suspense, and romance.” American Dirt refers to the land that is the United States of America and to the difficulty undocumented migrants face both before and after crossing the border.
According to SuperSummary,
Lydia Quixano Pérez, a bookstore owner in Acapulco, saves her son Luca from a massacre that wipes out their entire family at a quinceañera cookout. The perpetrators are three sicarios, killers for Los Jardineros, a violent local cartel. Javier Crespo Fuentes, Lydia’s close friend and the jefe of Los Jardineros, ordered the hit in retaliation for an exposé written by Lydia’s husband, a journalist named Sebastián Pérez Delgado. Javier’s murderous rage stems not from the article itself, but from the impact it has on his daughter, Marta, who commits suicide when she learns of her father’s true identity. Lydia and Luca spend the rest of the novel running from Javier’s men, encountering a diverse cast of migrants along the road to the US.
I read the book at the same time that Haitian migrants were being deported at the border. Ms. Cummins writes passionately about the plight of migrants and the difficulties they face as they seek a new life in the US. This book highlighted this to me in ways that I understood intellectually but not emotionally.
Ms. Cummins refers to a sign she saw in Spanish in Tijuana while she was researching this book:
También de este lado hay sueños.
On this side, too, there are dreams.
All of our ancestors were migrants, and they all had dreams of a better life. We need to find a better way to help those who now have goals find a home so that their hopes for a better future can come true.
