Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Kate Bowler lost thirty pounds without trying and was wracked by stomach pain nearly daily while going about her life as a professor at her beloved alma mater with an adoring husband and very young toddler son. She saw doctor after doctor, each dismissing her concerns, until she finally refused to leave a doctor's office until he actually TRIED something. Dismissive and hostile, he wrote orders for a CT scan while assuring her all her symptoms were psychosomatic. Then the results from the CT Scan came back and Ms. Bowler discovered she had stage four colon cancer and not much time left to live. This book isn't so much a calm meditation on grief as it is a reflection of the way we swing wildly back and forth from rage to calm to fear to grief and back again. She is living in the ever-present of stage four cancer - now must be enough because no tomorrow can be promised to her. While currently somewhat stabilized, she has written a book that is an absolute gift to us all. It is not a pat or trite reflection on sorrows that promises a better tomorrow - it's someone willing to sit with you in the dark, because she is there too. That Kate wrote this book is a gift not just to her family, giving them an inner vision of a very self-possessed woman's thoughts as she stares into, as she calls it, "an unbearable future" - it's a gift to all of us who have lived through grief. Whether the diagnosis was our own or for a family member - whether we mourned a loss that's already occurred or we're facing one we cannot bear to survive - this book will not tell you "everything will be okay". Instead, it will tell you, "you know, it might NOT be okay, but we'll keep living anyway and I will stand there with you." It's beautiful, raw, wrenching, hard not to read in a single sitting. A meditation on the way we are ALL adherents of the Prosperity Gospel when the chips are down.. we all want to bargain or find some thing we can do to "deserve" and receive healing. Sometimes, healing is not in the cards. Kate is there to walk with us through making sense of the world when everything is utterly senseless - on parenting when you're not sure how much longer you'll get to BE a parent - on loving someone who is going to lose you so much that you find yourself telling everyone to be sure he remarries, if it will make him happy. I read it in one sitting. I will be buying another copy to gift to my mother, but I can't give her mine - it's tear-stained all to hell and I will read it again. When my father died, I sought out books on mourning, grief, and death. I wish this book had existed then - it reflects how I felt so much better than anything else ever did.