Book Scars

Good Southern, church-going gals are not supposed to fear death.  Premarital sex, Wal-Mart, male kindergarten teachers, those are all ok to fear.  But not the great passing-on.  No, if you’re a person of faith, you’re supposed to welcome it.  Or, at the very least, not have an unnatural paranoia of it.

But I do.  I always have.  Maybe my fear is tied to the fact that death was such a frequent houseguest, growing up.  The church was our family, remember.  Dad was their patriarch, their protector.  I reveled in the marrying, burying, magic-in-a-starched-shirt power he held in their eyes. 

Until, that is, they started to die.  Then the whole holy-power thing started to get really old. 

Family trips to Disney world got canceled if someone died.  If a funeral had to be scheduled during a birthday party, the burying came first, the cake later.  A dying congregant trumped EVERYTHING.     

Then I read The Book that scarred me.  The Book triggered my resentment of the Reaper mating with the vulnerability inherent in all growings-up, and they formed a heavy spectre of fear that hovered around my awkward pre-teen frame.  It caused my shoulders to hunch even more than one would expect.  Where some of my classmates worried about the onset of cramps and acne, I feared diabetes, colon cancer, and something we’d studied in AP Biology called “Sleeping Sickness” (Had Dad been properly vaccinated when he went on all those mission trips?) 

When I was in the sixth grade shortly after I read The Book, my mother bought a copy of the American Medical Association’s home medical encyclopedia.  It quickly became my nighttime, under-the-covers sneak reading.  I drew my finger carefully down the self-diagnostic charts, and felt my heart rate ease a bit or so as I cross ailments off the list:

“Swelling…no…check.”

“Headache…well…maybe…onto the second fork in the diagram…”

“Dizziness…well…I am tired…”

Finally satisfied that I didn’t have pulmonary edema or glaucoma, I turned out the light. 

As I grew older, the fear subsided, but it didn’t come with an attendant ease in reading about the topic of death.  I realize it can’t be avoided, particularly in the memoir genre (seriously, try to think of one good memoir that does not include a death), and, in fact, some of the best writing arises from literary explorations of the grave.  Still, I don’t find it easy to go there.

Probably a hundred times I’ve passed Joan Didion’s A Year of Magical Thinking on the table at Barnes and Noble, and I’ve reached toward it, like a dieter confronting her nemesis in the bread aisle.  I want to hold it, to feel it.  But, with the admonition that “I really shouldn’t,” I pull my hand back.

I wonder if all readers have a flaw, that way.  Something they fear hiding in the pages from them, like a land mine.  They don’t want their eyes to trip over it and find themselves felled, emotions exposed where they’d planned to keep them hidden under a warm blanket, safe within the confines of some tome a friend dubbed ”a comfort read.”

Several months ago, a book club I attend read Nando Parrado’s Miracle of the Andes, the only first-hand account from a survivor of the infamous Andes rugby plane crash.  I read it easily because I’d steeled myself beforehand.  I knew the basic story of how many people would die, when, and how.  I’d mapped the landmines and knew how to step around them.  A member of our group didn’t have the same courage.  She admitted that her weakness came from the fact that she had boys of her own, and couldn’t read anything “where boys die.” 

Last month, The Book Therapist recommended Love Is A Mix Tape to me, and it was the same story.  She explained, up front, that the girl dies.  (This isn’t really a spoiler; it’s apparent very early and from the jacket that the death of the author’s wife prompted the book.)  I read it feeling that I controlled the map; the placement of the mines wouldn’t throw me.  I could even keep my eye open for a lesson — the thing the girl did wrong that I would know, from now on, not to do.  Or the thing she did too much of that I could now avoid.  I would grow affection for her, but not attachment.  I would survive to read another day, not fall down that deep rabbit hole where characters leap so passionately off the pages that they invade your thoughts, prompt your tears like the memory of a favorite grandparent, years after the cover is closed. 

I did that once, in fifth grade when our teacher read The Book — Winston Rawls’ Where the Red Fern Grows. And (as you can tell) the scars still show.  The Medical Encyclopedia episodes came shortly after, as did my hiding of my father’s copy of John Dunne’s Death Be Not Proud, behind a stack of books in the study, where New Testament concordances would muffle the painful reality of a brain tumor.           

Alas, I know it’s a vain exercise.  We have a saying in law that you can’t unring the bell (used to refer to statements, etc., improperly made in front of the jury.  You can demand that the jury “disregard what they’ve just heard,” but the reality is, well, you can’y unring the bell).  And you can’t unread a book.  The scars exist permenantly, whether you like it or not.

I’ll open the comment thread.  Which book has scarred you, and why?

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