On Life and Books
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We’re in the 36th week of the (secular) year, and so far, I’ve finished reading 36 books. I’ve started a few others too (my nightstand is notoriously overstacked), and some I’ve marked in my brain (and Goodreads) as DNF – did not finish. Some that I’ve completed are philanthropy and work-related, others distinctly Jewish. I enjoy listening to a good memoir or non-fiction book, and I’ve read a lot of contemporary fiction.
One book recently deeply touched me. I thought I would be reading a romance. Feel free to judge but in the past handful of years, I’ve become a romance reader. Just like some people like a mystery or a thriller, knowing it will be solved at the end, I like a romance that generally ends in a ‘happily ever after.’ I like that most of the characters don’t live in the real world, dealing with the complexities and issues that plague us day after day, year after year.
But some of these “softer” books do touch on the challenges of life. And one I just read, Emma Brodie’s Into the Blue, will stay with me for a long, long time. The main characters are young when they meet, from different sides of the “tracks,” with incredible chemistry. One disappears after a summer of daily togetherness without saying goodbye, and as they meet again and again throughout their lives, a devastating secret is revealed by the one who left.
Turns out, (spoiler alert if you’re planning on reading it), the character knows he has a rare genetic disease that will start to reveal itself when he’s in his 40s and take his life not too many years later. And while he deeply loves the other main character, he doesn’t want her to have a less-than-full life because he knows his will be shorter, with a painful and challenging end. They grapple throughout the book with the questions around terminal illness as “would you want to know,” and “now that I do know, how might this change me?”
Those questions sat with me long after I closed the book — but I’ve come to think the second is more valuable than the first. Once you know — or once you’re living with the possibility that you might not have forever — what do you do with that? Protect yourself, and the people you love, by pulling back? Or live fuller, faster, more honestly, precisely because nothing is guaranteed?
Our main character got this wrong (at least for much of the book). He treated his diagnosis as a reason to disappear — a misguided act of love, protecting the woman he loved from a shorter, harder life by removing himself from hers entirely. It wasn’t generous. It was a retreat dressed up as empathy.
There’s another way to answer it, of course. Not waiting for certainty to tell the people you love that they matter. Not waiting for a diagnosis to decide what you want remembered. If anything, the not-knowing — how much time any of us actually has — should make that answer more urgent, not less.
On the book front, I’m in the middle of Rabbi Alan Lew’s This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared right now, and it’s circling this same question from another angle: If so much feels predetermined — the ending, the shape of things — what’s the point of trying at all? I don’t think the book fully answers that, and I’m not sure it’s supposed to. But it keeps bringing me back to the oft-quoted Rabbi Tarfon line from Pirkei Avot I lean on more than almost any other: You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it. Not knowing how the story ends was never permission to stop building. Legacy, love, showing up for people: none of it comes with guarantees. That was never the deal.
So — if you knew, what would you build? And if you don’t know, and you never fully will — does that change your answer at all?
That’s the conversation I love having — not about the ending, but about what outlasts it. Let me help you think about your legacy, and how philanthropy can secure it, now and into the future.
Shabbat Shalom,
Kari
PS – What have you read lately? Send me a note. Always looking for recommendations!
