While sitting with my feet up, sipping coffee, my summer reading snuck up on me and caused me to ponder several facets of living. My cottage weekend was visited by words that packed a punch. Literary missives linger in my resting spirit. In my $8 bargain book by Julia Keller entitled, Sorrow Road, I uncovered priceless wisdom.
With some personal experience of death, I found that Julia’s character, Darlene, early in the novel, voiced aptly the mixed emotions felt by grievers:
Darlene was still grieving her father’s death … [She] was stunned, angry, turned inside out with the kind of despair for which there was no antidote. Grief was something you simply had to get through, howsoever you could. Grief was brutal, and it was cruel, and it lasted as long as it lasted. Grief could turn even the calmest, most poised and rational person into an emotional mess. And when grief was mixed with guilt, the guilt that burned and surged and twisted inside you because you so futilely wished you’d done more for your loved one, wished you’d stopped in more often and paid better attention when you did, wished you’d hugged him just once more during that last visit, and told him just one more time that you loved him, although, God help you, you did not know it was going to be your final chance to do that, to do anything –” (Page 20).
Julia Keller has the talent to capture the raw emotions felt by many people struggling following the death of a loved one.
Ms Keller in her writing blended incidences of sorrow with humour. I found myself chuckling as I read the quick retort, "As a friend of mine used to say, there is only room for one God. And the job's already taken." (Page 89) It was a useful reminder for myself.
Memory loss, dementia and Alzheimer’s are growing concerns in today’s aging population. Bell, one of Sorrow Road’s memorable characters, uses a striking metaphor to describe memory and it’s lost.
Bell felt a gradual recognition of memory as more than simply an assemblage of known facts and mastered capacities and recalled experiences, and more, even, than personal identity, but as the very tent pole of life, every life, the solid vertical rod at the center of things. When it collapsed, the fabric gathered in folds around your feet; if the wind blew, everything was swept away. And the wind was always blowing. (Page 123).
I find it indeed true that memory is that “solid vertical rod at the centre of things”. Many of us painfully witness as memory, that solid vertical rod, collapses and robs those close to us of their hold on life.
The above heartfelt references clearly show that Julie Keller has an excellent expertise in expressing emotions and creating stunning mind pictures. She uses descriptive language with creative skill and talent. She is an author who has sent me, a reading addict, looking for her other books.
Nancy Wales, CSJ
Sorrow Road by Julia Keller. New York: Minotaur Books, 2016