My random thoughts on Jan, love, grief, life, and all things considered.
Lucky Us by Amy Bloom is a book that hooked me on the opening line - “My father’s wife died. My mother said we should drive down to his place and see what might be in it for us.” Having surpassed my Goodreads 2022 reading goal, I wanted a lite, historical fiction book and found this one in the e-library. I enjoyed reading it and highly recommend it.
It has been a year since Jan and I had our last conversation.
Twelve months have gone by so quickly that it is challenging to accept how long it has been since we last spoke.
Her words of wisdom still fill my heart with joy, and every time I am unsure of which way to go, I ask What Would Jan Do?
She always guides me, even if her voice is silent.
I still miss the vibrant communication that was the core of the relationship since we met.
Her love will never die; it only grows stronger every day!
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While washing my face with only cold water, I wonder who that older man is looking at me in the mirror.
Unfortunately, I am that ancient man.
The only time I sense that my hair was once red is when it is wet. Even then, it is a hint of color hidden by gray hair.
My eyes are hollow and have permanent black eyes.
Only a year ago, Jan was beside me celebrating my birthday. Now I am alone and have aged a decade in twelve months.
If love never dies, why am I aging so fast?
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Jan and I always enjoyed Spring.
As we walked into the Convention Center in early March 2019 to attend the Philadelphia Flower Show, we breathed in Spring despite Jan’s aversion to pollen.
This short Apple Photos memory was the last year we attended. COVID and lymphoma kept us home the following year.
Other events in the video include:
Little did we know it would be the last healthy Spring we would have together. Love never dies; it only grows stronger every day.
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The first time I heard the phrase Zoom Friends, it sounded as oxymoronic as Facebook friends.
After almost a year in Zoom grief groups, I have changed my opinion.
Research by Jeffrey Hall, an expert in the psychology of friendship, has quantified that “it takes 45-hours of presence in another person’s company to move from acquaintance to friend.”
Although our contact on Zoom is in Hollywood Squares boxes, my fellow widows in my groups have surpassed the 45-hour timeframe and have become close friends.
They will never replace Jan, but they have filled a void and helped me survive the first eleven months of grief.
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I am an optimist by nature. Since Jan died, my faith has been tested.
Despite my doubts, I wake up every morning, take a deep breath, smile and start as if today will be different.
If every day is a new beginning, why do most days seem like the day before?
How long can I live if life is monotonous?
I wipe away tears that have yet to leave my eyes and proceed as if today will be different. I know that Jan will be with me, and our love will never die.
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I am not a basketball fan. Most years, March Madness flies by me faster than pollen fills my nostrils.
This year the St. Peter’s University Peacocks from Jersey City has become a cinderella team.
They barely qualified for the tournament and now are in the Elite Eight after beating universities much more prominent and more experience.
Their mantra is More is Possible.
As I continue my grief journey, the Peacocks remind me that if they can get up every day and play a game they love, I can continue to love Jan and share her love.
More is Possible for all of us!
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by Amy Bloom
Having surpassed my Goodreads 2022 reading goal, I wanted a lite, historical fiction book and found this one in the e-library. Lucky Us by Amy Bloom is a book that hooked me on the opening line – “My father’s wife died. My mother said we should drive down to his place and see what might be in it for us.” I enjoyed reading it and highly recommend it.
The first section in Hollywood was the one I found less appealing. Partly that is because I identified with Eva, and she does not fulfill her leading role until the last two sections. Its depiction of how people survived the way years by sometimes is a reminder of our inner resilience.
Goodreads provides the following summary.
So begins this remarkable novel by Amy Bloom, whose critically acclaimed Away was called “a literary triumph” (The New York Times). Lucky Us is a brilliantly written, deeply moving, fantastically funny novel of love, heartbreak, and luck.
Disappointed by their families, Iris, the hopeful star and Eva the sidekick, journey through 1940s America in search of fame and fortune. Iris’s ambitions take the pair across the America of Reinvention in a stolen station wagon, from small-town Ohio to an unexpected and sensuous Hollywood, and to the jazz clubs and golden mansions of Long Island.
With their friends in high and low places, Iris and Eva stumble and shine through a landscape of big dreams, scandals, betrayals, and war. Filled with gorgeous writing, memorable characters, and surprising events, Lucky Us is a thrilling and resonant novel about success and failure, good luck and bad, the creation of a family, and the pleasures and inevitable perils of family life, conventional and otherwise. From Brooklyn’s beauty parlors to London’s West End, a group of unforgettable people love, lie, cheat, and survive in this story of our fragile, absurd, heroic species.
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by Maria Reva
“Endling” by Maria Reva, a novel of exceptional literary merit, has been longlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. Set in Ukraine, the story follows an eccentric scientist who breeds rare snails and two sisters pretending to be part of the marriage industry in their quest to find their activist mother. As Russia invades, they embark on a wild journey that involves kidnapped bachelors and the last of its kind snail. This darkly comic novel delves into themes of survival, love, and hope in times of increasing darkness.
In Ukraine in 2022, Yeva is a loner and a daring scientist who lives outside her mob country. She traverses the country’s forests and valleys, attempting to breed rare snails, though her efforts often fail. Meanwhile, her relatives pressured her not to settle down and start a family. What they don’t realize is that Yeva is already dating multiple men—not for love, but to fund her work—entertaining Westerners who come to Ukraine on guided romance tours believing they’ll find docile brides untainted by feminism and modernity.
Nastia and her sister, Solomiya, are also caught up in the booming marriage industry. They pose as a hopeful bride and her translator while secretly searching for their missing mother, who disappeared after years of fierce activism against the romance tours.
Together, they embark on a journey across hundreds of miles, joined by three angry women, a truckload of kidnapped bachelors, and Lefty, a rare snail with one last chance to perpetuate his species. However, their plans come to a sudden halt when Russia invades.
In a strikingly ambitious and profoundly moving metafictive narrative, Endling masterfully balances horror and family, drawing on Reva’s own experiences as a Ukrainian expat navigating her family’s struggle for survival during wartime. As fiction and reality converge on the page, Reva explores the harsh truths of war: What stories must we tell ourselves to survive? How do we maintain our routines amid military occupation? And for those watching from abroad: Can our sense of normalcy and security ever be restored, or have they always been a fragile illusion?
Endling is a tour de force from an author who weaves a story of love, loss, humor, and devastation that only she can tell.
Maria Reva was born in Ukraine and raised in Canada. She holds an MFA from the Michener Center at the University of Texas. Her fiction has been published in The Atlantic, McSweeney’s, and Best American Short Stories, among others, and has won a National Magazine Award. Additionally, she works as an opera librettist.
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by Marlen Haushofer
Yesterday, I read “Killing Stella,” written by Marlen Haushofer and translated by Shaun Whiteside, which is a domestic horror story that culminates in an apocalyptic ending. This novella captures many of the themes present in Haushofer’s acclaimed novel, “The Wall,” presenting them within a claustrophobic, gothic, and striking narrative. It offers a gripping and incisive exploration of a fractured marriage, highlighting the remarkable talent of the author of “The Wall,” now available in English for the first time.
Main description: Left alone for the weekend while her husband and two children visit her in-laws, the narrator of “Killing Stella” recounts the addition of her friend’s daughter, Stella, to their already tense and tumultuous household. As she stares out the window at her garden, she worries about a baby bird in the linden tree, her husband Richard, who flits from one adulterous affair to another, her son’s gloomy demeanor, and her daughter’s obliviousness to everything. Most of all, she worries about Stella, a confused teenager who has met a sudden and disastrous end.
Marlen Haushofer (1920–1970) was an Austrian author known for her short stories, novels, radio plays, and children’s books. Her work has significantly influenced many German-speaking writers, including Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek, who dedicated one of her plays to Haushofer. One of her most notable works, “The Wall“, was adapted into a film in 2012, directed by Julian Pölsler and starring Martina Gedeck.
Shaun Whiteside is known for his translations of classic works from German, including those by Freud, Musil, and Nietzsche.
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates
We Were Eight Years in Power by Ta-Nehisi Coates is a collection featuring the landmark essay The Case for Reparations he wrote for The Atlantic. Even though I am a subscriber to The Atlantic and have read many of the pieces, this is a must-read book as it reflects on race, Barack Obama’s presidency, and its jarring aftermath, including the election of Donald Trump.
We were eight years in power as the lament of Reconstruction-era black politicians as the American experiment in multiracial democracy ended with the return of white supremacist rule in the South. In this sweeping collection of new and selected essays, Ta-Nehisi Coates explores the tragic echoes of that history in our own time: the unprecedented election of a black president followed by a vicious backlash that fueled the election of the man Coates argues is America’s first white president.
But the story of these present-day eight years is not just about presidential politics. This book also examines the new voices, ideas, and movements for justice that emerged over this period and the effects of the persistent, haunting shadow of our nation’s old and unreconciled history. Coates powerfully examines the events of the Obama era from his intimate and revealing perspective:” the point of view of a young writer who begins the journey in an unemployment office in Harlem and ends it in the Oval Office, interviewing a president.
We Were Eight Years in Power features Coatesa’s iconic essays first published in The Atlantic, including Fear of a Black President, The Case for Reparations, and The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration, along with eight fresh essays that revisit each year of the Obama administration through Coate’s own experiences, observations, and intellectual development, capped by a bracingly original assessment of the election that fully illuminated the tragedy of the Obama era. We Were Eight Years in Power is a vital account of modern America, from one of the definitive voices of this historic moment.
I recommend this book to all readers.
by Viktor E. Frankl
I recall reading portions of Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl at various times, but I never completed the book. However, recently, eight and a half months after Jan’s passing, my wife and I were discussing in one of my groups. Frankl’s theory of logotherapy, which derives from the Greek word for “meaning,” centers around the idea that the primary human drive is not pleasure, as Freud believed, but rather the search for what gives life meaning. I now have a framework for my life without Jan.
For those like me who are widows, Frankl understands suffering,
In some ways, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.
Jan and I lived meaningful lives. My challenge now is to continue to find meaning in my life without Jan.
As Frankl writes,
Those who have a ‘why’ to live can bear with almost any ‘how.
The love Jan and I shared was one of my primary sources of meaning. In addition, I stopped working full-time at the end of 2018 and struggled to replace the purpose I had gained from repairing the world. After Jan died, I suffered the “provisional existence of an unknown limit, ” which Frankl experienced when he was in the concentration camps.
I have replaced the loss of meaning and purpose with a series of activities:
I am also beginning to serve on the board of a few non-profits. It is time to transition from hands-on work to providing leadership in a different way.
Will this be enough to give my life meaning?
Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life, and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life, he can only respond by being responsible.
I must continue to focus on my search for meaning, as life will inevitably change over time.
My grief journey has taught me that love never dies,
For the first time in my life, I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth – that Love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry, thought, and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.
My path forward is to keep Jan’s love alive and continue to share it with others.
I recommend this book without reservation.
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by Beatriz Serrano
“Discontent” by Beatriz Serrano is a bold and darkly humorous novel that follows a young woman whose carefully constructed office persona starts to unravel when she is compelled to attend her company’s annual retreat. On the surface, Marisa’s life appears enviable. She lives in a beautiful apartment in the heart of Madrid, has a charming neighbor who often spends time with her, and has quickly ascended the ranks at a successful advertising agency.
And yet she’s drowning in a dark hole of existential dread induced by the banality of corporate life. Marisa hates her job and everyone at it. She spends her working hours locked in her office, hiding from her coworkers, bingeing on YouTube videos, and getting high on tranquilizers. When she has the time, she escapes to her favorite museum where she contemplates the meaning of life while staring at Hieronymus Bosch paintings, or tries to get hit by a car so she can go on disability.
However, Marisa’s dubious success, which is primarily built on lies and work she has stolen from others, is in danger of being exposed when she’s forced to attend her company’s team-building retreat. Isolated in the Segovia forests, haunted by the deeply buried memory of a former coworker, and surrounded by psychopathic bosses, overzealous coworkers, flirty retreat staff, and an excess of drugs, Marisa finds herself acting on her wildest impulses. She is pushed to the brink of a complete spiral.
Beatriz Serrano is a striking new voice in international literature. A writer and journalist who has written for publications such as BuzzFeed, Vanity Fair, GQ, Harper’s Bazaar, El País, SModa, and Vogue. Along with writer Guillermo Alonso, she currently co-directs the podcast “Arsenic Caviar“, which won the Ondas Prize for best conversational podcast. Discontent is her first novel. She lives in Madrid.
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by Julie Otsuka
The Swimmers: A Novel by Julie Otsuka is a novel about what happens to a group of obsessed recreational swimmers when a crack appears at the bottom of their local pool. This searing, intimate story of mothers and daughters—and the sorrows of implacable loss—is the most commanding and unforgettable work yet from a modern master. I highly recommend The Swimmers: A Novel by Julie Otsuka.
The novel was a page-turner from the first to the last page. It had been on my to-read list for months, and I am happy to start reading The Swimmers: A Novel by Julie Otsuka.
Memory loss is a frightening situation for anyone. Ms. Otuska writes powerfully and eloquently about Alice’s loss of her memory. I felt as if it was one of my loved ones.
The Goodreads summary provides an overview,
The swimmers are unknown to one another except through their private routines (slow lane, medium lane, fast lane) and the solace each takes in their morning or afternoon laps. But when a crack appears at the bottom of the pool, they are cast out into an unforgiving world without comfort or relief.
One of these swimmers is Alice, who is slowly losing her memory. The pool was a final stand against the darkness of her encroaching dementia for Alice. Without the fellowship of other swimmers and the routine of her daily laps, she is plunged into dislocation and chaos, swept into memories of her childhood and the Japanese American incarceration camp where she spent the war. Alice’s estranged daughter, reentering her mother’s life too late, witnesses her stark and devastating decline.
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