HOME AWAY FROM HOME (Lorna J. Cook)

Yesterday I was looking through some duplicate books from our library's collection, planning to discard the extra copies to make room for new acquisitions, when this novel caught my eye. It was short (196 pages) and it looked promising, so I started to read and found that I couldn't put it down. I don't think that this is necessarily "great" literature, but Cook effectively explores the grief and the guilt that accompany the sudden and untimely loss of a spouse. Anna Rainey is devastated when her 36-year-old husband, Dill, succumbs to a brain aneurism. After spending 17 hours at her comatose husband's bedside, Anna adjourns briefly to the ladies' room to wash her face and to apply lipstick so that the first thing her husband sees when he wakes up is not a bedraggled, unkempt wife. When she opens the restroom door she is confronted with the news that Dill has died in her absence. Unable to handle living in their home surrounded by constant reminders of what she has lost, Anna begins her journey through grief by establishing a series of temporary "homes" with friends until she can live on her own.

Some aspects of this book were jarringly unrealistic. I kept wondering if food was decaying in her refrigerator at home or if someone had cleaned it out, or how she managed to complete her taxes (Dill was self-employed), and who was paying her mortgage. Some of these questions (mundane, I know, but being a practical person I couldn't help but wonder) were answered briefly near the end of the story, thank goodness! Overall, though, I found Anna's journey through her first year of widowhood poignant and sad, with touches of humor and spirit thrown in, just like real life! As a counselor for students in a program called Upward Bound, Anna discovers that grief can come in any shape and size or at any age, and that some people are lucky enough to move on with their lives after a loss. This one is worth reading!