This book may contain language, sexual content, and themes of grief and loss, which may be challenging for some readers. Reader caution advised.
Sad and Happy – It’s All Part of Life
by Shane Timson
For High Plains Public Radio Readers Book Club, I’m Shane Timson from Colby, Kansas. Today I’m talking about the book Late Migrations: A Brief History of Love and Loss by Margaret Renkl.
No doubt this fall reading season has been very difficult as we have dealt with grief in different ways. I love this book because, yes, it does deal with grief, and there is some heavy stuff in here, but there is also some light-hearted stuff. There are some practical lessons that we as people can learn from this book. This is clearly my favorite out of all the ones that we’ve done. For this particular fall season, this is my fall favorite book.
For example, we learn that for us to live, something has to die as the story of the lilies tells.She says the lilies were beautiful on the lake, but the lilies were also killing the lake.Well, for us to live, things die. It’s just the way it is and one day we, ourselves, will die so that the next generation can take over. It’s how life is.We live. We die. We love. We laugh. We grieve, as the process is.
This book teaches us the process of grieving. I love this story of her son, her young son seeing that dead bird and going, “You dead! You dead!”
And then he asked the question, “Mommy, do all birds die?”
“Yes, honey.All birds die.” And then he cries, “Do all mommies die?” “Yes, son.All mommies die.” And he cries, “Mommy, will I die?” “Yes, son.You will die.” And he cries. |
That to me is a brilliant illustration of processing grief. And many of us don’t properly process grief. We go through it and we’re sad, but we stuff it down because we don’t want people to see that we’re struggling, so we stuff it down, stuff it down.
This book teaches us that we have to grieve. We have to process that so that we can go on living the way that we need to live. Life is short, even if you live to be a hundred and something years old. Life is short. We need to live, to be the best people we can be – make our lives in such a way that we can make our corner of the world better than we found it when we die – help the next generation learn what it needs to learn so that it can be better than the current generation.
I think those are lessons that this book teaches us that perhaps the other books didn’t teach us.
There are some light-hearted moments in this book like the story where her younger brother is sounding out a word and it’s a “bad” word. He goes, “What does it mean?”
She didn’t know what it meant either. So, there are some light-hearted things in here as well.
It’s a great bunch of essays to show the hard times of grieving, but also that there is a lot of fun moments in life and both are a part of life. So, enjoy those fun moments and I hope for you that you have many of them. But when you are in the dark seasons of grief, don’t deny it. Lean into that grief. Process that grief. Then you’re going to be able to help other people when they hit their time of grief.
Understand that life is a process. Things die so that we can live. And one day, we will die and we have to die so that the next generation can live and do what they need to do as well.
For High Plains Radio Readers Book Club, I’m Shane Timson from Colby, Kansas.
