• Complain

Maryanne OHara - Little Matches: A Memoir of Finding Light in the Dark

Here you can read online Maryanne OHara - Little Matches: A Memoir of Finding Light in the Dark full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2021, publisher: HarperCollins, genre: Science fiction. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

Maryanne OHara Little Matches: A Memoir of Finding Light in the Dark
  • Book:
    Little Matches: A Memoir of Finding Light in the Dark
  • Author:
  • Publisher:
    HarperCollins
  • Genre:
  • Year:
    2021
  • Rating:
    5 / 5
  • Favourites:
    Add to favourites
  • Your mark:
    • 100
    • 1
    • 2
    • 3
    • 4
    • 5

Little Matches: A Memoir of Finding Light in the Dark: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "Little Matches: A Memoir of Finding Light in the Dark" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

Gripping and true in all ways. This fine, affecting memoir will stay with me for a very long time.Meg Wolitzer, author of The Female Persuasion

In this vividly written memoir novelist OHara shares a painful but ultimately beautiful account of her daughter Caitlins life with cystic fibrosis. . . . Her compelling story will resonate with anyone seeking a light in the darkest depths of grief.Library Journal

In the vein of The Year of Magical Thinking and Beautiful Boy, an emotionally raw and inspiring memoir that illuminates a mothers grief over the loss of her adult child and considers the hope of soulful connections that transcend the boundary of life and death.

When their only child was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis (CF) at the age of two, Maryanne OHara and her husband were told that Caitlin could live a long life or be dead in a matter of months. Thirty-one years later, Caitlin lost her battle with this devastating disease following an excruciating two-year wait on the transplant list and a last-minute race to locate a pair of healthy lungs.

The sudden spiral of events left Maryanne in an existential crisis, searching to find an answer to the eternal question: Why we are here? During her final years, Caitlin had become a source of wisdom and comfort for her motherthe partner with whom she shared a deep spiritual quest to understand what it meant to have a soul. After Caitlins passing, Maryanne began to notice signspoignant, persistent synchronicities that seemed to lean toward proof of Caitlins enduring presence.

Weaving together a series of interconnected meditations with illuminating glimpses of life rendered via text messages, e-mails, and journal entries, Little Matches is a profound reflection on life and death, motherhood, the pain of chronic uncertainty, and finding inspiration in the unexpected sparks that light our way through the darkness.

Maryanne OHara: author's other books


Who wrote Little Matches: A Memoir of Finding Light in the Dark? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

Little Matches: A Memoir of Finding Light in the Dark — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Little Matches: A Memoir of Finding Light in the Dark" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make
Contents
Guide

For Nick and Dad

for Andrew and Jess and Katie

and for every kind stranger

Contents

Little Matches is a book about losing my beloved only child and my search for answers to the hard questions. Where is she? Is she? Is there more to life than this life? Does consciousness survive death? Does my existence have any real purpose? Does anyones?

Its also an exploration of the growth I experienced as parent and friend to a gift of a human being.

And its a meditation on universal truths about loving and losing and needing human connection.

Caitlin was born with a genetic, progressive diseasein her case, cystic fibrosis (CF)and like many children who live with serious illness, she was wiser than her years. As she grew sicker, and particularly as she grew into an adult, she became a kind of sage for those around her. She often joked that if she hadnt had CF, she might have been a shallow sort of person, which was her modest way of pointing out that she didnt think she was particularly special, it was just that having to face your mortality makes you look at life, and the world, with a much broader and deeper perspective.

She was right. People who face trauma, illness, or severe loss often find themselves transformed, and come to question or better understand what life is really for.

During her long wait for a lung transplant, I used a blog, 9LivesNotes.com, to keep loved ones abreast of news. After her passing, I kept it alive and every time I posted somethingan insight of my own, or some of Caitlins old-soul wisdomI would receive what I called the you dont know me letters. You dont know me but, they would begin, and go on to say how helpful it was to read honest, unsentimental reflections on suffering and loss, and on the mysteries that connect us as human beings who find ourselves alive, with questions, on a wild and nurturing planet.

People also found inspiration in my accounts of our strong mother-daughter bond, in how Caitlins wise words and ways became sources of insight and hope, even after her passing. These readers asked for more stories. They urged me to turn the blog into a book.

Even though writing the blog posts had been my salvation, at first I was too catatonic with grief to even think of tackling a book. But nine months after her passing, I realized I was adrift, that I no longer had any kind of rudder. If my writing about Caitlin was going to serve a purpose, then I wanted to do it.

I had to decide how to distill the material of our story into one that could inspire readers to contemplate for themselves what might really matter at the end of our temporary, beautiful lives. Here is what I came up with. I start with a chapter called Knowing, wherein I put myself and my reader right inside the worst of it: the stunning, sudden loss of Caitlin. I call this one-chapter section , I put in some pieces written by or about Caitlin that may be of interest. These are followed by a list of books and resources for those who would like more information on the various topics that I discuss in the book.

In real time, I looked for revelation. I became every human who has ever looked for answers to big life questions inside books and science and in the natural world and inside personal relationships. As the narrator of my own story I moved back and forth through time, much like memory works, and came to focus on a few ideas: that purpose in life is necessary, and probably a prerequisite to joy and contentment; that by acknowledging the inevitability of our mortality, we can actually better enjoy the time we are alive; that we are all connected; and that we all have work to do.

I am not the first person to have lost what was most important to me. Humans lose every day, and lose hard: children, beloveds, sacred homelands, freedoms. Little Matches is for anyone who loses and asks, Now what?

When Caitlin was clinging to life during her final days, she called us to her bedside. She was serious, fierce. Listen, she said, I need ferocious positivity from everyone.

Ferocious positivity isnt a meme or a passed-around quote. Ferocious positivity is here, in her last posted words:

My thoughts these days arent the skate-on-top kind of normal life thoughts. Theyre up and down and trippy and depressiveand we have a lot of laughs. And lots of crying. And weird creative urges. I just want to say thank you for listening to what sometimes must be very emotionally over-the-top sounding writing. And to reassure you I dont take myself too seriously. I do take life seriously though, Ill be honest... because its a seriously wild business.

Life is a seriously wild business. And its all ours, for a little while.

Someone recently referred to Little Matches as a healing garden of words. The metaphor took me by surprise. The speaker had just met me, and he did not know that Caitlin had spent the last two years of her life trying to save a world-renowned hospital healing garden. He did not know that since her passing, I had been trying to think of how I could create a kind of physical, real-life portable healing garden, a place where people might find whatever comfort and inspiration they needed. I wasnt even sure what a physical, real-life portable healing garden would look like. Now I think it might look like Little Matches.

In the middle of our lifes journey, I found myself in a dark wood.

DANTE

Its as horrible as I knew it would be. It is silent, internal hysteria, and it is unbearable.

People say, I cant imagine, and I think, Really? You cant imagine?

Maybe having healthy children protects you from letting your mind go to the darkest places.

One friend says, Im so sorry. I dont know how you can close your eyes at night.

Heres how I do it: I close my eyes. I ask the universe to give me an hour of unconsciousness. Somehow it works.

Im learning to talk to the universe.

I think, I can bear it if I know I will see her again.

I nonstop devour the kinds of books she and I sometimes liked to read and discuss. I call them soul books: We Dont Die; Many Lives, Many Masters; The Light Between Us. These particular books are intelligently written, credible, and they provide some comfort in the moment. Yes, they say, we birth into this life knowing, at a soul level, our lifes plan. Yes, there is more to life than this life.

When I close them, Im a frantic human mother again, sick with doubt and grief.

* * *

We are all so present in these two worlds we live inthe old natural world of relationships, of day-to-day existence, combined now with our digital selves, our presence in ten thousand photographs and videosthat the abrupt absence of any one of us, overnight, seems exponentially impossible.

We say what humans have always said, I cant believe I will never see her again. Yet there she is, talking from the small screen in my palm. There she is, existing. Disbelief compounded.

The brain gifts us with that disbelief. At the instant of comprehension, it shuts down, protecting us, I suppose, by feeding us small bits of reality at a time.

The only thing that makes me feel better, makes me feel connected to her, is writing on 9LivesNotes.com, the website I set up just before she was formally listed, on April 24, 2014, for a double lung transplant, the end-of-the-line fix for people with severe cystic fibrosis. We had heard of people who had had to wait up to a yearsometimes even longerbut the transplant team stressed that the call really could come at any time.

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Little Matches: A Memoir of Finding Light in the Dark»

Look at similar books to Little Matches: A Memoir of Finding Light in the Dark. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «Little Matches: A Memoir of Finding Light in the Dark»

Discussion, reviews of the book Little Matches: A Memoir of Finding Light in the Dark and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.