Recently Read: Blessings

I finished reading Blessings by Anna Quindlen this week.  It was a birthday gift from Brent's mom, who often introduces me to authors I've never read.  I really liked the character development and the unique story.  I'm intrigued to read more of her work as the story lines I've read about so far all seem very different in topics. 

Characters:

• Skip - A young, groundskeeper who lives on the property of an elderly, rich woman
• Lydia - The elderly, rich woman

Skip and Lydia begin an interesting relationship after a newborn baby (who Skip named Faith) is abandoned at the door to Skip's apartment over the garage on Lydia's property. 

A few of my favorite quotes, my thoughts in blue. 

It occurred to Skip that babies had a way of making people exactly what they were but more so.  Faith had brought out the rectitude and responsibility in Mrs. Blessing (Lydia), the warmth in Jennifer Foster, and the capability in him, so that she had made him think well of himself. 

This statement was very intriguing to me.  I don't know that it's true for all people all of the time, but it was certainly true in this novel and I have seen babies bring out the best traits in lots of people around me. 

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(Lydia's thoughts) That was the sort of deaths they had now: such sad news.  Once there had been the unthinkable deaths, like Benny's (her brother) and Sunny's (her husband), deaths mercifully obliterated by sleep so that each morning, as her mind surfaced from dreaming, she would have to accept them all over again.  Then there were the deaths that changed the world, that broke it in two: her mother, her father.  There had been Jess's death (her best friend), which had left her feeling as though she had stiffened her spine and her shoulders for the funeral and had never again let them go.  The first had been the unthinkable deaths of youth, the second the wrenching losses of middle age.  Now there were the inevitable deaths of old age, which one after another prefigured her own.  Such sad news.

This quote made me think a lot about my grandparents and other older adults I know.  It really put into perspective how differently death impacts us as we age.  I remember hearing once from an older person that the time they see their friends is when they're at another friend's funeral.  What a very sad reality and reminder of your own inevitable mortality. 

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She had been inside empty houses in the past.  There was a weight to the emptiness of rooms in which you had once lived that was more fearsome than anything she had ever encountered in life, not because they were haunted, as she had joked with Skip, but because they were not.  The conversations, the quarrels, the long fraught silences, the tears: they had disappeared utterly and completely.  A cemetery was a place intended to be still.  It was here, where once there had been life, that death was felt most profoundly. 

Isn't this so true?  It's very hard to be in a house you have lived in with family and/or friends when those people are gone. There is an eeriness to the quiet after all of the life that was lived in the house together.  I dread the days I will most likely face in this life when I have to leave my parent's/grandparent's/own house empty after my loved ones are gone.