“Healing is a small and ordinary and very burnt thing. And it’s one thing and one thing only: it’s doing what you have to do. It’s what I did then and there. I stood up and got into my truck and drove away from a part of my mother. The part of her that had been my lover, my wife, my first love, my true love, the love of my life.”
About This Quote
Steve Almond once said that Cheryl's writing makes you more human than you were before, and I've found that to be true. "We are not allowed this," she says of grieving, mourning, and learning how to move on. "We're allowed to be deeply into basketball or Buddhism or *Star Trek* but we're not allowed to be deeply sad." And I think the problem is cyclical: we don't always know what to do with our pain, which would mean we certainly don't know how to bear witness to other people's. The scary unknown becomes taboo, and so we avoid it. The Love of My Life taught me what so much of Cheryl's writing has, which is that "you can put up a good fight and still lose." As she says in Tiny Beautiful Things – acceptance is a small, quiet room.
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