COMPASSION 212 Summer 2022

Summer 2022 - Compassion | www.tcf.org.uk 7 father meets a woman later, whose daughter had died many years before and he asked her how long it had taken her to recover from the loss. She quickly put him right and told him she hadn’t recovered, and never would, but she hides it well. Back to the masks! I sat and read the whole book in one day, all the time wondering how a writer of fiction could capture those emotions so accurately, and I found out why in a note at the end of the book. Clare Mackintosh and her husband had had to face the same decision, when nothing more could be done for their son, although they agreed on what they should do. She has a book coming out in February, called ‘I Promise it Won’t always Hurt like this’, which she’s written for other grieving parents, and I will acquire that one for our library as well as ‘After the End’. The second book was sent to me by Gil Roberts, my predecessor in the library, and it’s excellent too. It’s called ‘The Phone Box at the Edge of the World’ by Laura Imai Messina and is also based on a true story. It revolves around a young mother, whose mother and daughter died in the Japanese tsunami, and a man whose wife died at the same time leaving his young daughter with so much mental trauma that she’d stopped speaking. The meeting point is a disused phone box, on a remote headland near the sea, where people go to talk to their dead loved ones. This is not a supernatural type of book, and there’s no magic hotline to heaven (if only), but saying what they want to say, out loud, is helping people to grieve. It’s much what we do when we tell our stories to each other or write our thoughts down in poems and diaries and letters to our children. To quote from the book “it was important to tell stories, to talk to people, to talk about people….. even to speak with the dead if that helped” (p57). We meet other characters, who are also grieving, and they all help each other. The grief remains but they learn to cope with it and assimilate their loved ones into their own lives as time goes on. It’s a beautifully written story and I really like it. As I mentioned earlier we do have a small selection of fiction in our library although I’m very careful about what I allow in because there are some that are pretty awful. If anyone would like to borrow any, or would like some advice on books to download, please do let me know.