My Notebook: For One More Day

I do not know where to begin. This book, the story, touched my heart deeply. It made me smile, it made me cry. Perhaps, because I read this book over the Mother's day weekend. Thus, I was a bit more emo than usual :p

The story is about Charley Benetto, a broken man, his life destroyed by alcohol and regret. He loses his job. He leaves his family. He hits rock bottom after discovering he won't be invited to his only daughter's wedding. And he decides to take his own life.

Driving drunk towards his hometown in an attempt to kill himself, he met with an accident but appears to be fine. He left the scene to try his attempt again by climbing up a water tower to jump down. That still didn't kill him though.

He pick up after himself and walk towards his mother's house. He was surprised to be greeted by his mother there. Why? Because his mother died a few years ago.

This is not really a ghost story. Chick was in another world where his mother was there to guide him through things in the past. It's like she's giving him one more day with her to 'make good with a lost parent, to explain the family secrets and to seek forgiveness'.

Chick's mother was a divorcee. His father left and she's the one who took the responsibility of him and his sister. She was the one who put him to college, which he didn't know until later, but Chick decided to drop out so he can be a baseball player to appease his dad. That broke his mother's heart.

There's this paragraph in this book that some what make me look at divorce differently...

In college, I had a course in Latin, and one day the word "divorce" came up. I always figured it came from some root that meant "divide". In truth, it comes from "divertere," which means "to divert."

I believe that. All divorce does is divert you, taking you away from everything you thought you knew and everything you thought you wanted and steering you into all kinds of other stuff, like discussions about your mother's girdle and whether she should marry someone else.

For One More Day, Mitch Albom, Pg. 128

It's a simple book, but very poignant. Towards the last few chapters of the book, I was crying buckets. Some folks used to tell me, you wouldn't understand a mother's feelings until you became one. The daughter becomes the mother. So true...

Read this book!

xoxo