4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Read This Book -- Really, February 20, 2000
This review is from: Language Lessons (For When Your Mom Dies) (Paperback)
It's not often that a book comes along that says, "read me." Really read me. We all can all name a few. They fall under classics, with a capital C. Mary Clare Griffin's Language Lessons is one of those books, for it calls our rapt attention, not just to its poetry, its language, music, mystery, but also to its content: brutal, raw, life stuff - death, reconciliation and redemption. Language Lessons reminds us, in the words of Rainer Maria Rilke, "everything that makes more of you than you have ever been, even in your best hours, is right."
Language Lessons IS right. It will make more of you than you ever been: it will make you laugh, and cry, and make you angry and fiercely committed to living your life with a heart and palm wide open. It will make you want to voyage, in the same way Griffin does, down your own personal river of self discovery, self knowledge, and yes, self indulgence: turbulent, dangerous, personal and utterly painful. And yet, so, so necessary.
Language Lessons invites all of us to witness Griffin's journey during four years of her adult life. Through oft-times pared-down diary entries (think emotional Zen) and carefully worded prose, Griffin takes us through the illness and eventual death of her mother, by observing, recording and uncovering her family's drama and trauma (including her own) springing from this tremendous loss. And what a loss it was. Not just the death of a friend, a wife, a lover and a mother of five, but the death of everything we protect so closely within ourselves: trust, need, desire, love. Innocence. It is this loss with which Griffin wrestles. And she does so with the grace and truthfulness of a poet. Indeed, she bares her life in stark, brutal honesty -- true, open, close-to-the-bone-language, the stuff of heartfelt prayers: help, wait, stay, love me, don't die, forgive, forget. Engaging, eloquent, at times elegiac.
Ultimately, Language Lessons transcends the grammar of death. It rises above finality to rest in the newness, renewal of reconciliation and redemption. Griffin's work delivers hope, for, if nothing else, she allows us to see her own soul, bare, wide open and full of grace. With such honesty and such beauty, we wait patiently for her next book.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
a powerful healing tool for all families, November 4, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: Language Lessons (For When Your Mom Dies) (Paperback)
As a physician who attends several hospice conferences a year, I found this book invaluable for caregivers, especially those of baby boomer age. Rarely does one find such an honest and raw account of what it is like to lose a parent; and, the subsequent despair- and healing- that ultimately follows. Griffin offers us a gift.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
FRIGHTENING AND EXHILARATING, March 27, 2000
This review is from: Language Lessons (For When Your Mom Dies) (Paperback)
Must read: Terrified of how close to home this book hit-frightening and exhilarating play by play account of a woman on the edge dying inside while her mother was dying of cancer.
This book is intense and hard to put down. Triumphant in the end she pulls herself up and becomes a catalyst for change, due to a power that intermingles with my own----revealed.
In the end: a time of rebirth, growth, and renewal.
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