Good Grief

It turns out this book isn't quite so much of a handbook on widowhood as it is a handbook on how to reinvent yourself in a beach read kind of way. I'm not complaining, by the way. 36-year -old Sophie Stanton does lose her husband to cancer and author Lolly Winston does hit some of the right notes on how that kind of grief might affect a person, but I thought a lot of the protagonist's efforts to navigate the world without Ethan as fitting any single woman's life.

I like that the book is in sections, because the first section is a bit painful as Sophie sinks into depression. It's like that with grief: You know it's going to hurt forever so you just want to skip forward 6 months or so because you think that by then you'll have found a pattern to your new life. In Sophie's life, she moves to Oregon and rashly becomes a Big sister to a troubled Little Sister. Warning bells went off with that, but it wasn't slapstick at all and Sophie makes a good go of it. More warning bells went off when she becomes involved with an local actor (the cleft chin and square face put me off too, but apparently he's assumed to be handsome), but that romance works okay, too.

One thing Winston gets right, is the loneliness of widowhood. Not just the lack of companionship, but the desire to touch someone intimately, or to be held. Sophie also turns to Ethan when things are going wrong. She's stuck on a terrible, terrible attempt at a dinner with a creepy guy from a grief group and she can't manage to leave. Ethan, I need a ride! Wherever my husband is, however dark that place might be, I want to go there, right now, she thinks. Sophie, like the rest of us, is so used to having someone to call in emergencies, and suddenly she can't. That's just one more of the indignanties of being unexpectedly single. Who do you put down for an emergency contact? Who do you call when you need a ride? Who even picks you up from the emergency room?

I like the dreams Sophie has, too, always thinking Ethan is just somewhere else. I dream that I run into Ethan...His hair glistens like a mink coat and I want to touch it. He's with a policeman. They explain that Ethan's been in a car accident and the officer is trying to help him find his way home. I look down and see the edge of Ethan's hospital gown hanging out from under his parka...I want to tell him that he wasn't in a car accident. He had cancer and now he's dead. But I'm afraid I'll hurt his feelings, like telling someone they could lose a few pounds or their clothes don't match.

Things more or less work out for Sophie in this book, but it's never a patronizing book or too simplistic/formulaic in the writing, though Windston does add in a homeless guy and a mother-in-law suffering from not-too-annoying-or-scary Alzheimers. At least with Ethan's mother's Alzheimers, Sophie gets to mention her husband's name several times a day, something for which Sophie is touchingly grateful. She pulls her new life together which is just what you hope for for anyone who has suffered a loss, even if it's not as dramatic as a death.

On a related note, Lolly Winston might have reconsidered using such a cheerful author's photo in this book. It just doesn't fit. Her other book is about someone who can't have children. Obviously she's got a dark side. I guess she can't adapt her photos to the subjects, but still, it seemed a little icky and added to the overall feeling that she hasn't really experienced grief of this magnitude. I guess that's probably good because grieving people probably can't write a good work of fiction with any distance. I suppose the photo helps to not scare people off and really, it's the kind of book that's not hard to enjoy on some easy level.

Images: I like her description of COBRA as an ill-tempered snake who wants to cover only 50 percent of "allowable" charges for out-of-network doctors. And her aside that people have too much junk. Sophie tries to drop off Ethan's things at Goodwill (when she's finally ready to do so) and finds the bins overflowing. There's simply too much junk in the world. Each person should be allowed a small quota, the way you're allowed only two bags when you fly. I'd be in trouble, but it's a nice idea.