Some books break you open, and some widen your cracks to let in light. They dim the comfort of the mundane and call upon you to face your thoughts. If you’re fortunate, you meet up with those often tormenting you. The stubborn ones lurking in your jagged edges and the guise of forced calm.
Paula is such a book. The trauma-tainted portrait of Isabel Allende’s family and her daughter who falls into a coma.
When a friend had first recommended it to me, he warned that the memoir was extremely sad. Having struggled with a distant but still raw loss, I thought it would make a good read. I thought it would be an opportunity to sit with my sadness. I thought the pangs of reading a traumatic story would validate my own. We need that occasional purgation of emotions to stay functional. I want my daughters to remember me as a heroine of great fortitude, far from a mortal burdened by sorrow or life’s banalities and wasted expectations.
Allende had written this book to celebrate her daughter’s life, to create a space in which its readers and her can share their grief but also their hopes and memories. As I read, I quietly shared mine.
We’ve accepted as a truism the notion that death can be processed with time. As if we can resume life unscathed. As if loss can be mourned to a limit. Marcel Proust once said that “we are healed from suffering only by experiencing it to the full.” God knows I have had years to process every detail, every memory, every high and low point, but that crushing anguish and mute anger have never escaped me.
I miss them. I always will.
My friend had read the book in his formative years when neither of us had yet been struck by misfortune. He was still young. His sad was different from mine. He had probably then possessed that uninformed innocence that makes one unwittingly believe that tragedy happens to other people; that life will continue to be good and giving as it always has.
There was in clearest terms a reminder of the nonlinearity of common life
Unlike him, I read it having already been at the side of loved ones who had since passed. The maze of hospital corridors is still fresh in my mind. My eyes welled up on different pages, but as the tears fell they summoned a soothing mix of comfort and contemplation. They nudged me out of that faint composure mothers aim tirelessly to master, that numbing type. My unexpected catharsis climaxed one night, not when Paula was taken home after doctors had given up on her, but when her grandmother stopped breathing.
Still the book offered so much more than those bouts of welcomed sadness. There was the relentless love of a hopeful mother surrounded by magical seers, healers and psychics; a Marxist government elected by democratic vote that ended in a crushing dictatorship; and even an afternoon in the company of Neruda.
There was also the budding feminism that the author first experienced as a child, which later morphed into a conviction that powered the rest of her journey. There were the happy memories of a distant childhood, the ones we cling to as our images in mirrors assume aging contours. There was thwarted love and receding youth, and the squeeze of a dull existence. And then there was the celebration of sexuality unburdened by tired norms and stereotypes of assumed innocence and reservation that render women passive objects of forbidden pleasures.
But most poignantly, there was in clearest terms a reminder of the nonlinearity of common life. A beautifully woven confirmation of the blandest platitudes. That despite one’s intricate planning fate can come in unannounced, uninvited. That full control or agency is elusive, even delusionary. That people grow apart. That time can pass so slowly. That joy and sadness can coexist. That love is a miracle. That dreams can be more reasonable than reality. That life, without effort, has an unyielding flair for the dramatic. That its natural bent for testing us is exhausting but inescapable.
But also that hope is a marker of the truly living. An invisible force that may delude but can breathe life into corpses.