Man of Leisure: Column Two

Posted 11:53 a.m. Friday, June 7, 2024

Life, Death and the Pages In-Between

Grief is the worst roommate. It never pays rent. It lets the dishes pile up. It never uses a coaster. In March, shortly before I first got the idea to do this summer leisure reading project, a dear friend suddenly passed away. And just like that, Grief showed up at my apartment door, cardboard boxes in hand, and made a home for itself.

“What good fortune that I have this reading project,” I told Grief, dismissing it with a wave of my hand. “I don’t have to look at you at all. I have books to read. Love triangles to get invested in. Mysteries to be solved. I’ll forget about you; you’ll get bored and move out.”

At first, Grief and I uneasily coexisted as roommates. I threw myself headfirst into the leisure reading project. Sentence after sentence, page after page, book after book, I put space between Grief and myself. It still ate my snacks late at night. It still would pester me in the middle day at my job. It existed as this low vibration of melancholy.

For a period, I thought I had outmaneuvered my newfound cohort as I kept my nose buried firmly in a book. I soon found out that what I was running from was staring me in the face. The memoir Stay True talked about what it’s like to have a friend die via a shocking act of violence, Call Us What We Carry touched upon the lives lost during the Covid pandemic, I’m Glad That My Mom Died deals with the complicated feelings of a young person’s relationship with their parent and the lingering effects even after they’ve died. It was like Grief had started its own book club.

One of my absolute favorite books was Afterparties: Stories by Anthony Veasna So, an excellent book of short stories about Cambodian refugees and their children in California. As the son of a political refugee from the Sudan, I was particularly moved by the book and read the inside back cover to see what other books So had written. I was struck to see that he had died in 2020, before this collection of stories had been published.

Murphy Library provides campus-wide access to the New York Times (NYTimes.com).

Using Murphy Library’s subscription to the New York Times, I found an article published in the run-up to Afterparties: Stories release that talked with So’s family about his unexpected death. A mix of emotions washed over me. I was saddened that So’s life had been cut short, and I wouldn’t get to see him grow and evolve as a writer over the years. Another, greater part of me was happy that I had at least gotten to have the pleasure to read any of his excellent writing. Maybe it’s not much in the grand scheme of things, but it meant a lot to me.

If Grief was my roommate, this leisure reading project was my Grief Counselor. Every book was a therapy session: challenging me, consoling me, forcing me to confront my complicated feelings about my own mortality. This didn’t just come from reading self-help books, either. Healing, I discovered, knows no book genre. It can be found between the lines of any book that touches you, that moves your spirit.

So where are things now with Grief and me? Well, it no longer lives with me. It does, however, visit now and then. We curl up together underneath the blankets on my futon, and I read it a story. Sometimes it’s a happy story. Sometimes it’s a sad one. No matter what, it sits quietly next to me and listens closely. Maybe that’s all we are, all we can ever be if we do things right, are the stories we tell each other about each other. When I get to the end of a story, Grief nuzzles its head against my shoulder and whispers gently, “That was nice, tell me another one.” And I say, “Sure, anything for you.”

21. The Gospel of Wellness by Rina Raphael

Keywords: Nonfiction, self-help movement

Synopsis: A deep dive into the billion-dollar wellness industry, Raphel explores why it came to be, where it stands now, what the future holds and how this industry continues to embed itself into our lives.

Review: An insightful look at the ever-evolving wellness industry that will have you thinking twice before subscribing to the Goop newsletter or sipping the next tummy tea.

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