Not going to lie, I teared up a couple times due to this book. Many may deny it, but we’ve all had that thought cross our minds at least once in our lives: “What will I do if my parents die?” This book brings about a realistic perspective of how death is treated, as well as how it should be dealt with.

Throughout this book, the number one goal the family has is to find one professional that will say the father’s cancer is not terminal. That everything would be okay, and everything would be taken care of. That was not the case. This book didn’t dance around the topic of death, it didn’t allow this family to witness some sort of “miracle” and have the father’s cancer suddenly disappear. He didn’t get to say those final last words that people in movies typically do, right before they die. He only sat in agony, wanting death to come and take him yet also wanting to stay alive, in this world, with his family. I think the book’s realistic approach to death is what got me emotional; most of the time, with deaths in movies and other books, I don’t get emotional. In fact, I actually criticize it; if a book or movie doesn’t make a part emotional to the reader where it should be emotional at, what’s the point in including it? I feel like the build-up of the relationship between the sisters and their parents definitely helps the reader form some sort of sympathy for the characters, or even empathy, knowing that they all care for one-another, and that they have little time to show this. Something that, again, people fear.

However, despite the characters not accepting that the father was going to die soon, the book also provides a couple of alternatives of how to deal with the death of a loved one, such as the Monks suggesting that one lives and lets go. Really, that’s the only thing one can do at a time like that; enjoy the company of the loved one, while also accepting that death is nature in and of itself.

I also feel that the layer of complexity the characters have also adds onto the greatness of the book. One specific example I remember was how, during seminar, one person mentioned how the father’s sister was “a bitch”. While that is the first impression one gets from her no doubt, the train-of-thought in that instance was analyzing her from the outside, rather than going in-depth on her personality and reactions to certain subjects. For me, I have a bunch of mixed opinions on the sister, mostly due to the fact that her complexity as a character doesn’t only simplify her as a “bad” character. For example, the environment she was raised in encouraged the superiority of men over women, so it wasn’t surprising that she was so lenient with her boys making a ruckus. It’s definitely not acceptable, but she is in the mind-set that this is okay, that this is how things should be. She also saved her brother from a massacre when they were both children and raised him on her own, showing that she does love her family. However, this does not mean she has negative aspects of herself, such as how she keeps trying to convince the family that the father has strayed off god’s path due to his life choices. And, while I did defend her on her mind-set of men > women, she still did not do anything even when the girls came to her about the boys bullying them. It’s so hard to say whether I like or dislike her, since she has so many contradicting traits about herself that make her both a likable and unlikable character.

As with the other books we have read so far, I definitely enjoyed reading this one as well. I had expected Hannah’s disappearance to be the primary conflict, but instead the reader is given insight to how a family that’s torn apart still came together to help care for and love their father even until his last breath.