Tragedy shattered Marie Lawson Fiala's life as wife, mother and lawyer when her 13-year old son, Jeremy, was felled by a massive hemorrhage from a ruptured artery deep in his brain. Within an hour, Jeremy was in a coma, sustained only by machines. This memoir of a mother's ferocious care, devastating loss and prayerful transcendence focuses on bringing her son back from the edge. The suspense is relentless and the author's observations as sharp as a scalpel.
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In gem-like, evocative prose, writer Marie Lawson Fiala describes how her family was brought to its knees by a near-fatal childhood illness, and then, miraculously, how it was uplifted by that very same trauma. . . . What I loved about the book was its combination of, to borrow Ken Wilber’s phrase, grace and grit. Amidst unimaginable pain, the power of presence and prayer shine forth as beacons for us all. --Raphael Cushnir,
Author, Unconditional Bliss; Back to Us: A Couple’s Journal of Reconnection and Growth; and The One Thing Holding You Back.
Marie Lawson Fiala's account is lyrical, moving, and utterly absorbing. In the tradition of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking or Martha Beck's Expecting Adam, she details how ordinary existence can change in an instant. The reader learns how a family's terrible challenge can bring great wisdom, renewed spiritual strength, and even moments of joy and beauty. --Gretchen Rubin, Author, The Happiness Project (#1 New York Times bestseller)
In a sea of mediocre memoir, Marie Lawson Fiala's magnificent, meticulous and utterly moving chronicle of her son's combat with death shines like mother of pearl. Open your heart to this book. It's that rare thing--an almost perfect read. --Jacquelyn Mitchard, Author, The Deep End of the Ocean (Oprah's Book Club)
Letters from a Distant Shore is a book about Grace: The Grace of love, the Grace of children and the Grace of life itself. Marie Fiala's beautifully crafted words shine in the darkness like a nightlight, reminding us that even at times of the greatest vulnerability and despair, we are not alone. Bring tissues. You'll need them. --Dr. Naomi Rachel Remen, Author, Kitchen Table Wisdom and My Grandfather's Blessings
Letters from a Distant Shore is an extraordinary memoir of parenting and faith in the face of a terrible medical crisis. Dishes piled up in my sink as I read Marie Fiala's riveting story; laundry went unfolded and emails went unanswered. Although I haven't met Fiala or her children, when I turned the last page, I went straight to my computer to send her an email, inquiring about her family today. Her writing will draw you in and make you care. Fiala writes with the precision of a scientist, the grace of a poet, and the fierce love of a mother. --Caroline Grant, Editor-in-Chief, Literary Mama
Marie Fiala's Letters from a Distant Shore is a heart-breaking, hopeful book, one that conveys with beauty and grace some of life's most impossible disjunctions: motherhood and disability; love and loss; strength and weakness; faith and despair. This is a marvel of a book about the human spirit's capacity for survival and repair. --Vicki Forman, Author, This Lovely Life: A Memoir of Premature Motherhood (Winner, Bread Loaf Writer's Conference Bakeless Prize)
In this harrowing memoir, a mother endures the unendurable when her son is stricken with a devastating illness. When her 13-year-old son Jeremy nonchalantly collapses with a ruptured vein in his brain, the author's safe, carefully tended life with her husband and three children comes crashing down. Jeremy lies in a coma in the hospital, fighting for his life against a barrage of dire complications, his right side paralyzed while his left side unconsciously flails about, trying to pull the painful drainage tubes from his head. Fiala cares for him around the clock, soothing his convulsions, willing him to breathe, but beneath her exterior of calm efficiency she is "a small, frightened animal in a dark cage, keening with grief." After the immediate crisis wanes, the family faces a lengthy, gray struggle to adapt to Jeremy's handicaps--to teach him to sit up, to dress, even to chew and swallow--while facing an agonizing choice between the probability of a subsequent rupture and a dangerous, experimental procedure that might resolve the threat for good. Fiala's limpid, sharp-eyed prose is unflinching in its depiction of the ordeal. She shows us the ravages inflicted on Jeremy by his illness and by grueling medical procedures, the callousness and occasional negligence of an overstretched health-care system and her own exhausted coldness toward the other suffering children in Jeremy's ward. But she also discovers inspiration, hope and renewal in the experience--in Jeremy's dogged courage and good cheer in confronting his disabilities, in acts of compassion by friends and strangers, in the testing and reaffirmation of her faith. (A spontaneous Internet support group called the Jeremy Network sprang up and held several prayer vigils that preceded near-miraculous improvements in Jeremy's condition.) Fiala's unsparing yet lyrical account of lives shattered and rebuilt despite daunting constraints teaches us how much we can lose without losing what matters. A luminous story of love, heartbreak and hard-won wisdom. --Kirkus Discoveries, August 17, 2010
About the Author
MARIE LAWSON FIALA's first language was Czech, and she learned English only after starting grade school in the U.S. She earned her BA in Psychology with Distinction from Stanford University, her Juris Doctor degree from Stanford Law School, and MFA in Writing from the University of San Francisco. A full-time practicing attorney and a partner in an international law firm, specializing in complex commercial litigation. She is married and the mother of three children. She lives with her family, two wise cats, and a humble dog in California.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Not a read to be missed,
By Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Letters from a Distant Shore (LaurelBooks) (Paperback)
Hope is something no mother can ever be short of. "Letters from a Distant Shore" is a memoir from a desperate mother as she faces the terror of her own son afflicted with a brain hemorrhage and in a coma. Blended with her own memoir and letters to others and those who supported her, she tells a riveting story of a mother who never gave up and inspires others to do the same. Touching, "Letters from a Distant Shore" is not a read to be missed.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Defying the diagnosis: a compelling how-to/thriller,
By Private Biographer (SF, CA USA) - See all my reviews
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Letters from a Distant Shore (LaurelBooks) (Paperback)
Letters from a Distant Shore, Marie Lawson Fiala's debut page-turner, pulled me through its 300 pages in a day. The author's journey is worthwhile, taking us through an excruciating three-month ordeal begun as her thirteen-year-old son suffers a sudden cerebral hemorrhage due to a deep, hidden defect. In the process she projects the stories of key family players, with Jeremy's health crisis as lens.The true story, which ultimately ranges over years with the later ones aptly truncated, was likely not penned for financial gain. Fiala and her husband of (now) twenty-six years have secure jobs in the legal and financial sectors, respectively. So the reader surmises that Fiala wants to do some thinking and thanking, and to sow some seeds of faith so others might tap the power of concentrated consecrated prayer as did her family. By her reckoning, prayer saved her son's life, and while perhaps occupational shyness confines the comments of the medical professionals, they can muster description of the lad's recovery as "miracle," "unusual" and so on. Fiala seems straightforward about her shortcomings, doubts, and near-constant fears, hence this book is about redemption. But it also records an achievement, a global team triumph. These two aspects alone would make the book compelling, but Fiala's lush, poetic use of language makes it a bittersweet delight to drink in. And imbibe, splash, swim in -- anything one can think of doing in or on liquid is applied metaphorically and un-self-consciously on almost every page -- one of the book's charms. Indeed, Jeremy's problem is first manifested in days of excess fluid in his brain, and at tale's end we are above the waters of Maui. The redemption aspect says: "My faith was tested, so might be yours. Try God (but don't "test" Him/Her). It doesn't matter what brand your beliefs are. God matters." Fiala of course doesn't end up walking on water, but she still has her son despite well-informed and -intended predictions of the worst. Her doubts redeemed, Fiala emerges a stronger, humbler person. The thick vein of motherhood running through the story -- as when Falia refers to herself as "Tiger Mom" -- brings to mind the recent publication of "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" [...], the supremely confident and very secular stereotyping of Chinese Mothers which has met with such controversy very recently. But to this reviewer the only things the two have in common is love of offspring, a tendency toward control, and well-evolved work ethics. The second factor is quite mild in Fiala's case when compared to the more recent book's Yale Law professor mom. Cynics might be tempted to discount Fiala's message because of at least ten advantages her life brought to the disaster: Religious training and experience, helpful parents, steady and substantial income, two Stanford degrees, intelligence, excellent memory, a stable and durable marriage to a spiritually sophisticated partner, natural beauty, whiteness, blondness, excellent health insurance, flexible employers for her and her husband, Kristor Lawson. But why should these points of privilege dilute her maternal pain? Who dares to quantify or compare pain, anyway? Where is it written that tales of triumph-over-adversity must spring from slumdog circumstances? A perfect example of this is the current smash film, "The King's Speech", [...] and Fiala's story belongs in the same category. In King George's case his disability could have cost his country the war, and we might all be speaking German. Fiala's loving, receptive, restorative energy made all the difference for young Jeremy, and the very process was a boon to the spiritual lives of the hundreds involved in prayer for him. Still, this could suggest a discomfiting existential aspect of the blow suffered by Fiala's family: life would have been simpler had Jeremy died. Grief, yes, but that tapers off over time, though never totally, for a parent. (Been there, done that.) Jeremy's continuing disabilities required superhuman efforts from his parents, therapists, nurses, et al to rehab him, yet one doubts any would say they regret rising to the occasion. Fiala quotes, and chooses well, a fair amount of scripture, and the ordeal's massive expenditure and effort bring to mind and life Jesus' parable of the lost sheep: "If a man has one hundred sheep, and one of them goes astray, doesn't he leave the ninety-nine, go to the mountains, and seek that which has gone astray? If he finds it, most certainly I tell you, he rejoices over it more than over the ninety-nine which have not gone astray." (Matt. 18: 10-14) While the Fiala and Lawson seem a practical pair, the story conveys little done for personal convenience. It would be hard to imagine what more the couple could have done for their son: alternating 24-hour shifts at bedside, tending two other children, buying and selling houses, assuming hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. At book's end, one is left with the feeling that this is how God ought to take care of his broken children. Fiala's actions reflect her frequent communication with a loving intelligence, and I believe her. The dare for non-believers (who might want to dismiss Jeremy's improbable recovery as a coincidence, for instance) is to deny a substantial woman her spiritual bona fides. It would be good sport to see what this seasoned corporate litigator would do if fed such antagonists in debate. Preemptively, perhaps, she devotes an entire chapter to review of the scientific literature on prayer's measurable, replicable effects on healing and recovery. Perhaps pulling her punches, she never cites a century's worth of affidavited healings through prayer collected by the American-based Christian Science [...] church, nor other denominations' forays into healing. But she was not at all choosey nor parochial (she is Catholic) about whose prayers she'd accept for Jeremy as the buoying group united by her emails expanded across the globe. And here, is a grand lesson from the book. Remember the 2007 Google-maps-based search for lost pilot [...] Steve Fossett in the American West? Strangers around the world took tiny parts of satellite map-photos and searched for shiny aluminum. Similarly, Planet Hunters [...] has amateur astronomers around the globe searching parts of the stellar sky for evidence of extrasolar planets collaboratively since humans have better pattern-recognition ability than most computers. The world will be seeing more of this sort of constructive neighborliness, with technology easing the path. Fiala's quest is a casebook for focused prayer -- almost like an array of radio telescopes concentrating a signal. It's not the only way to pray for healing, but it saved this boy's life and might do the same for you or someone you hold dear.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A profound, heart-wrenching and heart-warming read,
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Letters from a Distant Shore (LaurelBooks) (Paperback)
Elegant in style, profound in insight, relentless in candor, Marie Fiala's book about how she and her family fought their way back from the catastrophic brain hemorrhage of her oldest son, Jeremy, is a testimony to how God can bring beauty out of ashes in answer to perseverance in prayer. It is a must-read for anyone in the ministry, for anyone suffering through the serious illness of a loved one, and for anyone who wishes to be transported to a distant shore, to a place filled with the grace one may only see through the lens of agony.
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