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(3.65) | 41 | Six women gather to celebrate their friend Kate's recovery from cancer, where she strikes a bargain with them: to celebrate her new lease on life, she'll do the one thing that's always terrified her, but if she does, each of them will also do one thing that they'd find difficult. |
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Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? -Mary Oliver  | |
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For Gloria and Marjorie | |
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Life came back slowly, Kate realized. | |
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Sometimes, Daria thought, that group of women was more trouble than it was worth. She'd only said yes to the do-one-thing-that-scares-you pact because she thought she would get something exciting like bungee jumping or sex on a houseboat. She should have known better. … “Learn how to make bread” - that was classic Kate. She wondered, sometimes, though, what she would have done without the women who entered her life during that time. Marion, Dan's boss's wife, setting up a baby-holding circle and introducing her to Kate and Caroline and Daria. And then there was Hadley, Sara's next-door neighbor, who had walked across the lawn and into Sara's living room... When Sean died she understood for the first time how completely human beings were dependent upon a suspension of disbelief in order simply to move forward through their days. If that suspension faltered, if you truly understood, even if only for a moment, that human beings were made of bones and blood that broke and sprayed with the slightest provocation, and that provocation was everywhere – in street curbs and dangling tree limbs, bicycles and pencils – well, you would fly for the first next in a tree, run flat-out for the first burrow you saw. Marion wondered at the time about Kate's ability to figure out what each of the women in the group seemed to need. They had all spent so much time taking care of Kate – but maybe, Marion had thought as she observed Kate handing out the challenges, the watching hadn't been all one way. She had never felt the simple urgency of time more than in the past few years, as her ovaries creaked into silence and she had gone for months and then a year without the gush of blood or the deep purple sadness that came with it. She had understood that something was ceasing within her and, more important, would never start again. The cold reality of it had struck her, as if, perched on the crest of a roller coaster, the rest of the ride was suddenly, irreversibly clear. On the way up, the vista had been infinite, the time to look about sometimes agonizingly long; now there was only the certain and dispassionate knowledge that there was one set of rails on which to travel, the ending immutable and about to begin. It didn't matter that the rest of the trip might take twenty, even thirty years to complete; the angle of the ride had changed. And now, twenty-eight years later, her daughter was pregnant.
There were moments in life, Marion thought, when you reached back, baton in hand, feeling the runner behind you. Felt the clasp of their fingers resonating through the wood, the release of your hand, which then flew forward, empty, into the space ahead of you. | |
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▾References References to this work on external resources.  Wikipedia in English
None ▾Book descriptions Six women gather to celebrate their friend Kate's recovery from cancer, where she strikes a bargain with them: to celebrate her new lease on life, she'll do the one thing that's always terrified her, but if she does, each of them will also do one thing that they'd find difficult. ▾Library descriptions No library descriptions found. ▾LibraryThing members' description |
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Kate has listened, both with her ears and her heart while her friends talked about their lives during her illness. She picks the one task for each woman that will give her hope and bring back the joy in her life. Some of the tasks sound mundane and pointless at first, like learning to bake bread, but there is a reason for every choice Kate makes.
The author has done her research well for this book. One of the women is "assigned" a Breast Cancer 3-Day. Having done the walk myself, that part of the story, with the vivid and accurate descriptions, was bittersweet.
This is a story of love, friendship, hope, and heartbreak. It's about moving on and starting over and remembering that life is for living.
I won this book in a GR First-reads giveaway. (Thanks, GR!) (