The Fault in Our Stars

The Fault in Our Stars

"She said, "I won't be a mom anymore." That gutted me pretty badly.
I couldn't stop thinking about that during the whole Cancer Team Meeting. I couldn't get it out of my head, how she sounded when she said that, like she would never be okay again, which probably she wouldn't." Pg. 117

You really have to think about that. You have to imagine that you had a child and you lived with them and you talked with them and their laugh and the way they cried and the sound of their voice. Maybe you're 45 years old and you have at least another 30 or 40 years left and its just you. You have to imagine how emtpy the house would seem, how quiet it would be; the walls would resonate with pain and sadness. Every time you looked at the empty chair at the dinner table, or the empty bed in the bedroom, you would be reminded of the person who used to be there. You would remember peaking in while they slept and listening to their breathing, in and out, and seeing their sleeping face; how peaceful they looked. And every time you walked through the house you would be reminded of what could never be, and what never was. This emptiness that would gut you and might never go away and every year there would be a birthday and a death day, for the rest of your life that you could never escape.  And people would go on living their lives and expect you to go back to your life but your child never would. Your child would be dead. Every morning would be a cloudy sunrise and every evening a moonless night, the stars would lose their brilliance, the brightest colours would dull; teardrops would turn to rain on a window pane. Cooking a meal would only serve as a painful reminder that you are now cooking for one less. This emptiness would gut you.  And that's why parents should never out live their children.

And that pretty much sums up that book. I would consider this a solid mediocre book. Mostly because it was predictable, I pretty much guessed the ending near the beginning of the book. The writing was decent. Would I read it again? Probably not. But I enjoyed it while I read it.