Customer Reviews

The Stuff of Life: A Daughter's Memoir

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Karen did a beautiful job of making me laugh while I cringed. I got this book because I am currently in her shoes with my own dad--our shoes are different sizes but the path is the same. I was helped knowing her experience, knowing her thoughts, feelings, reactions and how she coped with not knowing. Her humor touched me deeply and I felt so grateful that there is also room to laugh during this challenge of life and death. I highly recommend this book to any adult child who chooses to courageously face and honor their parent during their final chapter. I have felt so alone at times but have also felt helped by Karbo's generous contribution for those of us who follow in her footsteps. She has helped me not to judge myself and to open more softly to accepting the reality that one of my loved ones is in the midst of his final times here and compassion for self and others truly connects and brings a crazy kind of peace. Thank you Karen.

Here's what is so terrific about this book: 1) It satisfies your morbid curiosity about how death really happens, eg "I didn't know how long a body could hang on, how dying can be imminent for days and days and days," a truth nobody ever tells you; 2) it satisfies your morbid curiosity about how other respectable competent people actually get through the deaths of their loved ones and how they fall apart a bit (eg don't actually want to hear details about their bowel movements). 3) It's tragic AND funny, often at the same time, as when Karbo describes her cancer-and-chemo ravaged father coughing into a square of kleenex and folding it into ever tinier and tinier squares and then dropping it into a plastic bag, or rewards himself by having a SINGLE JELLY BEAN FOR DESSERT, or counts the number of kibbles he gives his dog, 23 every day. We get this great clear sense of him as a bit exasperating in his obsessive-compulsivity but also as a meticulous and a profoundly decent and moral human being, a duality which helps those of us with gigantically ambivalent feelings about our own parents. Along the way Karbo tells similarly horrible/funny stories about the lives and deaths of other luminaries in her life like her mother (brain cancer), stepsister (suicide), dog (euthanasia). 4) There is genuine suspense about what happens next: even though we ultimately know "how it ends," we don't know HOW it ends, and in fact there is a mystery about Karbo's actual parentage which gets revealed at the end. 5) The best part, though, is that you end up gobbling the book just waiting to see how Karbo is going to say stuff. For example that her father's nurse's real name, Sandra Nightingale, is so unlikely that it "must be her nom de nurse." Or that her grim and determined mother, just before dying when Karbo was a bewildered 16, strategized with Karbo about her college wardrobe, "not unlike a general discussing battle plans with his immediate subordinate." Or that on his deathbed her father "stares up at the ceiling. He looks hypnotized, but at the same time preoccupied, as if he's doing a difficult math problem in his head." This writing captures important stuff, in fact the stuff of life and death. This is good writing and this is a good, even a great, book.

When my sister passed this book on to me I thought I'd never read it. Like I want to read about someone's father dying of lung cancer? It turns out I read The Stuff of Life in about two sittings. This compulsively readable memoir is funny and wise and has a lot to say about how important it is to just be yourself, and do what you can for the people you love. It debunks the myth that in order to be a caregiver you have to have a Florence Nightengale-type personality. It's NOT about death, but about how we live. It's about the mess of life. I thought it was way better than Tuesdays with Morrie, because it was more real.

Karen Karbo's "The Stuff of Life" is both heart wrenching and humorous in a blend that few writers can pull off.

Karbo is a freelance writer (something she compares to having a lemonade stand for a living), the primary breadwinner for her family of a husband, 1 child and 2 stepchildren, and now the caretaker for her father as he lives out the last ten months of his life with terminal lung cancer.

Only Karbo's razor sharp wit and delicious sense of irony make this tragic story both insightful and humorous in a way that makes you truely see how, if someone doesn't laugh they're going to cry.

One would be hard pressed to find a more conflicting match of nurse (Karbo admits she is distinctly not of the caretaker temperament and a "barfaphobe" to boot) and patient (her father being a stoic "Greatest Generation" dad who, no matter how awful he is doing feels obligated to portray that everything is Just Fine And Dandy!)

After reading "The Stuff of Life" I had the strong urge to pick up her other books... I have a new favorite author. The voice of her books is incredible and no matter what the subject she draws you in and keeps you there.

Karen Karbo really knows how to write a page-turning masterpiece.

I work for a hospice and this book was quite informative in many ways. Including: father/daughter relationships, lung CA, explanation on how it can effect someone and taking care of a loved one at home. I was surprised by something that is disclosed in the book) and taken slightly aback but I was motivated to read more!

Very good heartwarming book. Really enjoyed the characters, and the writers perception of events.