Are we ready for book club?

I'm ready when everyone else is. Hope you're doing ok, Beth. Think of you all the time. Sue

I'm good to go any time, Beth.

Ready Beth.

I will lead off, as promised with a discussion from near the end of the book, with life after death...for those who remain, not for the departed.
Please feel free to yank the discussion back to the beginning whenever you would like.
Having just lost my soul mate to PCa, this is what is most applicable to me, but I found the entire book to be thought provoking and surprisingly humorous. Both of the discussion quotes are from Hazel Grace after Gus dies.
First quote: "It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we'd done were less real and important than they had been hours before. "
Second quote: "I knew that time would pass for me differently than it would for him-that I, like everyone in that room, would go on accumulating loves and losses while he would not. And for me, that was the final and truly unbearable tragedy"

In the few weeks since Gary has passed I find myself still telling people about our conversations that are relevant to whatever it is I'm talking to the other person about. Like, "Oh, I was talking to Gary about that a few weeks ago and he thought it would be a good idea to use that kind of wood on the roof." It wont be long before these conversations will be non existent and that the time will pass differently for me. I'm not sure how well I will navigate that transition. It's still too new and too soon.

Gary and I spent a lot of our conversations in the car or in the living room reminiscing about the past: travels, friends, experiences. A lot of memories and shared laughter. I'd like to keep reminiscing, but I don't have my co-rememberer.
In the immediate days following Gary's passing, his sister texted me several memories of shared laughter that really helped me focus on the good times. One in particular where, while I was in town shopping, Gary cut out the center of a birthday cake I had made for his niece. He ate the piece and filled the hole with a paper towel and refrosted over the missing piece. All with his sister watching and admonishing. Of course when I cut into it I had tears running down my leg from laughing so hard. His sister was furious that he didn't get in trouble for ruining the cake. I guess he always got away with stuff when they were kids too.
I'm going to ask others to substitute as a co-rememberer like his sister did, because it will be important to me to keep those happy memories going when I'm lonely and missing him.
In the book, the youth of the characters makes it all the more tragic that Gus dies young and that Hazel Grace will not live long, because there is little time to make those memories and experience a full life. Adults can often die without regrets, as did Gary. As will I, I suppose.
How can young people possibly die without regrets, or those who survive? Their youth precludes the possibility. Not that a 90 year old would always die without having regrets, but at least they have the opportunity to live a fulfilling life.

Okay...take it away ya'll. I'm headed to bed. Hopefully to sleep. Does tossing and turning count as exercise? Some nights I'm getting a good workout!
Beth

Bump back to first page.

Carolyn - I think you're right on. Robert Pirsig, in the Afterword of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" talks about that idea with the tragic loss of his son. We all exist as a pattern, waves of influence, reflecting and modifying the patterns of all around us. In the sense we are shaped, affected, by those around us, and in turn we shape and affect others, our patterns persist long after we are gone physically.

Who we are, what we are, has a larger existence beyond our physical selves, a pattern impressed upon those around us. For a parent, a child, a spouse, someone with whom we have closely resonated perhaps for decades, that pattern is likely to be deep and powerful.

I can see many ways my wife and I have shaped each other. We have a shared lifetime, "inside jokes", thoughts that only take a single word with the right intonation to bring back entire experiences. Either of us, even without the other physically present, will be experiencing that pattern in endless contexts. We will influence each other the rest of our lives, whether physically here or not.

It's a comforting thought in many ways. Even in the grief of loss, we can find joy celebrating the pattern, the kaleidescope of memories, associated with those close to us.

Thumbs up to halbert. Great post.

Halbert's very insightful comment:

"… for us as a social group, WWII and the depression are becoming past. WWI is almost the past."

reminds me of a story once told to me by one of my librarian colleagues when I was still working in the UF Libraries back around the mid 1990s.

She said she was manning the public reference desk in the Reference Department one day when a young, fresh-faced coed (obviously a freshman, they have a certain look to them) came up to the desk, and asked for some help in preparing to do an assignment for the world history class she was taking. When queried by my colleague, the girl added that her assignment was to write about "some kind of thing," a "conflict" she thought it was, that happened "a really, really long time ago" between the United States and "some country" over in Asia.

Not quite sure what the coed was referring to, my colleague attempted to gather some more information from the girl by asking if she remembered what the Asian country was. The coed replied that she "thought it was Japan."

Stunned a bit, my colleague asked "What? Do you mean World War Two?" "Oh yeah, that was it," responded the coed.

Somewhat amazed, my colleague then sent the girl off to the encyclopedias, figuring that was likely the best place to start her off, all the while wondering how, even though it’s been a while, a whole new generation, or at least some members of it, didn't know about WW2

But maybe my colleague shouldn't have been so amazed. Halbert is right, things begin to slip into history after a while. Even the echoes of World War Two, that awesome war that so dominated the world and that generation, have become fainter and fainter over the years. So perhaps it shouldn't be so surprising if a younger generation doesn't feel the enormous impact it had on the world, the way we earlier generations have felt it.

(BTW, cultural anthropologists have noted that all human groups develop a structure for the passing down from one generation to the next of the memories (that is, the culture) of the group. The general pattern is for the men to remember and pass down the general culture of the group, or tribe, while the women do so for the personal relationships that have gone on among members).

But what exactly do we remember and why, when thinking of departed loved ones? I must thank Froggy88 for that quote from C.S. Lewis. I actually do remember one day some time following my own wife's passing feeling very much the way Lewis describes in that quote.

I believe Lewis and I (and anyone else who would have been at that point in the grieving process) were entering into a new stage of grieving, and Lewis was describing it.

There are a number of theories as to how the stages of grieving may operate. This article from the American Cancer Society website seems to be a good overview:

/www.cancer.org/treatment/end-of-life-care/grief-and-loss/grieving-process.html

I think memories of a person and the stages of grief intertwine. When evaluating the memories we have of a departed loved one, we need to take into account the impact that the stage of grief we are in may have on this process.

Wonderful discussions. Sorry I missed them in real time.

My 90 year old mother died last Wednesday. My elderly father died a couple of years ago. The ideas of how their thought patterns replicated into the behaviors and brains of myself and my brother, and other relatives near to them - perhaps even down to similarities in how our brains are wired - were very interesting.

(Carolyn, speaking of Douglas Hofstadter, I still fondly recall reading his award-winning book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid many years ago. I was a Math/Physics major, myself, and relished in its complex interweavings. )

Charles

Finally joining in (out of town, Kindle troubles, etc). I wonder if author John Green had first hand knowledge of cancer. He nailed the emotions I’ve felt as a spouse/caretaker-- the grenade analogy, wanting to protect others from the pain of loss, and the disconnect felt with some friends who just don’t understand or don’t know how to respond. True words: “Cancer is a civil war.” The book was written with humor and empathy.

Lots of book recommendations from the group this time. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is on my to read list—I second that nomination.

DYank said...
I wonder if author John Green had first hand knowledge of cancer. He nailed the emotions I’ve felt as a spouse/caretaker-- the grenade analogy, wanting to protect others from the pain of loss, and the disconnect felt with some friends who just don’t understand or don’t know how to respond.

SueCAll said...
I loved the snarky humor, but thought that the quest to find the book's ending was too drawn out.

There's an interesting backstory here. John Green started working on a novel titled The Sequel, but abandoned it and incorporated large parts of it into The Fault in Our Stars, which was inspired by Esther Earl, a young fan of his whom he got to know after a chance meeting, and who died of thyroid cancer when she was 16. (She had cancer when he got to know her, and yes, she was on oxygen then (just like Hazel Grace). John Green wrote about her here.) So he did have some rather direct knowledge of a teenage girl who went through what his character did, and the abandoned earlier novel explains why the plot is out of balance over the author quest subplot.

Charles

Sorry to hear of your loss. At least you have done the best thing a child can do, which is to outlive your parents.

(Interesting - I was also a Math/Physics major, and I also loved the Godel Escher Bach book many many years ago. And I'm impressed that you got the umlaut on Godel.)

One more thought on the current book: that thing about outliving your parents being the natural order of the world shows up in The Fault in our Stars too. I remember how outraged my grandmother was when my uncle died young. And I've noticed that parents who have lost children get over time a particular look to them. I don't mean this to be disrespectful, but they sort of look squashed. Crushed in a literal way. Other grieving people can have that look too, but it usually goes away.

Thanks for the discussion Beth! On to The Immortal Life!

-- Carolyn