Book 5 "Me Before You" by Jojo Moyes
Today I drove in a maze to work. The roads were a labyrinth of tall snow walls, dangerous and impossible to see drivers coming out from one maze hole to mine. My nerves ran up those dirty gross snow walls saying, "How can I do this?!" I felt despair to keep ahead even one more winter day. Today the basement flooded again. Dirty water sitting still. We did our best to clean it but the water kept trickling in making me feel like screaming for it to stop. The 10 ft of plowed snow resting against our house, seeping into our house...I was ready to take my passport, shove the cats in their traveling cage and leave with my husband. Leave it all: the jobs, pictures, schedules, the couch, the stuff. Take the first flight out to someplace where people retire. If they retire there, shouldn't it be a good place to live till you get to retirement age?
But I didn't give up today. Though I could easily argue that staying in NJ is defeat. I took the miserable day one minute at a time trying hard not to contemplate each facet of my life, future, and mistakes.
One thing that kept me going this week was this book by Jojo Moyes. Sometimes during rough patches one little thing can help you ease by with less dread. This week I needed this book. In this book, she seemed to say so many things about life, loss, giving up, mediocre work, and demanding more from life that I could totally relate to.
The main characters are Will Traynor and Louisa Clark. Will is a strong man, who has traveled the world, been highly educated and had a sexy life of luxury. One day he is in an accident and becomes paralyzed from the neck down. He needs to be spoon fed, cleaned, put to bed. He misses his old life. Louisa is a waitress who looses her job. She dates a shallow marathon runner, lives in a crappy house with her parents, grandpa and sister and has no ambitions. She is not educated and is hired to take care of Will: feed him, talk to him, and make sure he doesn't try to kill himself.
Lovely story, right? Well, Will sees how ignorant and placid Louisa's life is. And he despises the lost potential she has: she can move, she can visit the world, she can make love and he never will again. In a sort of Pygmalion he pushes her to learn, to try new experiences, to demand more from life. All the while Louisa is trying to keep him from going to a Swiss euthanasia clinic to kill himself. She decides to show him that he can accept his life paralyzed, that it is worth living.
The story has several parallels in death: Will's determination to die, and Louisa's acceptance of life without....life, ambitions, personality, love, acceptance. Both are a type of death. The story goes much deeper with the topic of acceptance where Louisa accepts her idea of Will's frailty physically. She never realizes how much stronger, quicker and stubborn than her he is mentally. He is incapable of accepting a life without purpose, as he sees it.
The story also shone a light on how we don't need to accept things the way they are because time, or fate commands us to. Louisa, after dating Marathon Man for years, moves in with him. She felt it was in the right sequence of events. Then, after caring physically for Will, day after day, she realizes she knows and feels more for paralyzed Will than she ever felt for Marathon Man.
I won't tell the end of the book.
This book is about love, loss and life more than anything. It is about the living with purpose, loss of life, choice of life and how we live our daily ones. With who, how, with what joy, purpose.
But I didn't give up today. Though I could easily argue that staying in NJ is defeat. I took the miserable day one minute at a time trying hard not to contemplate each facet of my life, future, and mistakes.
One thing that kept me going this week was this book by Jojo Moyes. Sometimes during rough patches one little thing can help you ease by with less dread. This week I needed this book. In this book, she seemed to say so many things about life, loss, giving up, mediocre work, and demanding more from life that I could totally relate to.
The main characters are Will Traynor and Louisa Clark. Will is a strong man, who has traveled the world, been highly educated and had a sexy life of luxury. One day he is in an accident and becomes paralyzed from the neck down. He needs to be spoon fed, cleaned, put to bed. He misses his old life. Louisa is a waitress who looses her job. She dates a shallow marathon runner, lives in a crappy house with her parents, grandpa and sister and has no ambitions. She is not educated and is hired to take care of Will: feed him, talk to him, and make sure he doesn't try to kill himself.
Lovely story, right? Well, Will sees how ignorant and placid Louisa's life is. And he despises the lost potential she has: she can move, she can visit the world, she can make love and he never will again. In a sort of Pygmalion he pushes her to learn, to try new experiences, to demand more from life. All the while Louisa is trying to keep him from going to a Swiss euthanasia clinic to kill himself. She decides to show him that he can accept his life paralyzed, that it is worth living.
The story has several parallels in death: Will's determination to die, and Louisa's acceptance of life without....life, ambitions, personality, love, acceptance. Both are a type of death. The story goes much deeper with the topic of acceptance where Louisa accepts her idea of Will's frailty physically. She never realizes how much stronger, quicker and stubborn than her he is mentally. He is incapable of accepting a life without purpose, as he sees it.
The story also shone a light on how we don't need to accept things the way they are because time, or fate commands us to. Louisa, after dating Marathon Man for years, moves in with him. She felt it was in the right sequence of events. Then, after caring physically for Will, day after day, she realizes she knows and feels more for paralyzed Will than she ever felt for Marathon Man.
I won't tell the end of the book.
This book is about love, loss and life more than anything. It is about the living with purpose, loss of life, choice of life and how we live our daily ones. With who, how, with what joy, purpose.
I think I will start tomorrow right with a cappuccino and a croissant then look at some of my favorite pictures of Italy. That is a chapter that was filled with life: pain, happiness, art, frustration, history, fear, friends, joy, food, loneliness, day trips, immigration bureaucracy, language, food, music, fog, and I'm glad it happened.
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