I'd just lain down in bed when the phone rang. It was my mother.
"Meg?" her voice rose. "You're home? There's something I want to tell you," she said with a deliberateness that alarmed me. "And I wanted you to hear it from me." She hesitated. "I haven't been feeling well and I went to the doctor for some tests, and she found a tumor."
The next week she called as I was walking back from lunch to my office on Fifty-seventh Street. As the afternoon crowd bustled industriously around me, she said bluntly, "The doctor got the results. The tumor is cancerous. I'm going to need to have surgery and then maybe radiation and chemotherapy, and we need to do it soon. But they think they can treat it," she continued.
This is my story of how Meghan O'Rourke dealt with her mother's diagnosis of colon cancer and the grief resulting from her losing her battle to fight it. This is her memoir that deals with how she went through the process of healing and shares those thoughts and memories with us in her book, The Long Goodbye.
So much of dealing with a disease is waiting. Waiting for appointments, for tests, for "procedures." And waiting, more broadly, for it - for the thing itself, for the other shoe to drop. Except in the waiting you keep forgetting that "it" will really happen - it's more like a threat, an anxiety: Will my love love me forever? (pg 63).
It's Meghan's honesty in sharing her most intimate thoughts that makes you feel like we are her closest friend as she pours these out to you in her own words. You feel priviledged, like you have reached a secret place where friends share this secrets and thoughts with one another to keep yourself from going crazy keeping them all bottled up inside. Meghan possesses such courage in sharing how difficult it must be to watch her mother go through this and knowing there is nothing you can do to make it better. This is what makes this book so great for us to read.
For those that have gone through a grieving process in watching cancer take someone you love from you, you can relate to the various emotions that come across the pages in this book and create a kinship that we can all identify with.
I received this book, The Long Goodbye by Meghan O'Rourke, compliments of TLC Book Tours for my honest review and rate this one a 5 out of 5 stars. While the subject matter is difficult, it makes it easy for anyone to understand the grief process and how much it changes us from the inside out. It creates a new sense of normal of us in which there is no going back to be able to change it.
For more information about this book, the author and where to purchase a copy, please click on the link below:
Thanks to the generous folks at TLC Book Tours, they are offering a giveaway copy to one lucky reader. Here are your guidelines:
1. You must be a follower of my blog, Reviews From The Heart.
2. Please like my Reviews From The Heart Facebook page by clicking here.
3. You must be a resident of the US or have a US shipping address. Please No P.O. Boxes.
4. I must have a way to reach you so be sure to include your email address with your comment below. You can use the words (at) or (dot) instead of the symbols.
5. Please leave a comment and let me know why you'd love to win a copy of The Long Goodbye. The giveaway will end on April 23rd. I will notify the winner via email at that time.
