Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship
- Sep 25, 2014
- 2 min read
★★★★☆
How does one write a review of a book about loss and grief when one is stricken by loss and grief in the midst of reading said book? This is precisely what happened to me when my Westie, McDougal, had to be put to sleep—quite suddenly and quite unexpectedly at the age of 14—just as I was arriving at the point in Gail Caldwell's memoir where she loses her best friend to cancer. Was it coincidence? A cruel cosmic joke? Something more? I don't have the answer (or can't admit to it), but that I was reading exactly the sort of book I would never choose for myself (my wife, Megan, insisted) precisely when I would suffer my own heartbreak has me searching for answers to questions I've rarely, if ever, contemplated.
After McDougal's passing, I couldn't bring myself to return to Let's Take the Long Way Home for several weeks. When I did, it was only to cruelly discover that, in addition to losing her friend, Gail Caldwell loses her dog, too: "Clementine was with me for four more years." That opening line in the final chapter sent me into a tailspin for several more weeks. Then tonight, a month after burying my beloved McDougal, I forced myself to push through. The worst of it was already out there: Gail's friend and dog were dead, and so too was McDougal.
As far as books about loss and grief not being my thing, I found Gail Caldwell's writing real and honest and laced with a minimal amount of preciousness. So I found myself carried along, even while never really caring about the characters in the story. What Let's Take the Long Way Home did do for me, however, was to help me place my own ongoing grief in perspective, to allow me to see my own sorrow through another's understanding of loss and cast that lens back onto my own memories of my life with McDougal. What more can I ask of a book?
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