130, NG55, F62, E123 / WG75, M63, MF5, B2, D6, Frz1, C1, NA1

Jodi Picoult, Wish You Were Here

Das neueste Werk von Picoult war das erste Buch für mich, das die Pandemie zum Thema hat, und das auf so geniale Weise, dass es mich völlig gefangen nahm. Besonders nach der völlig unerwarteten Wende in der Mitte war ich komplett fasziniert. Sovieles wird hier so eindringlich beschrieben, die Situation in New York während der ersten Wochen und Monaten des Lockdowns, die Verzweiflung der Ärzte und des Pflegepersonals auf den Intensivstationen, die Erfahrungen der Patienten, die beatmet werden und ihre Halluzinationen, besonders der Protagonistin, die für die Dauer ihres Krankenhausaufenthaltes in einer ganz anderen Welt zu leben scheint.
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Finally, a nurse gave me a plastic bag with the hospital logo on it. Inside was my father's wallet, his reading glasses, his wedding ring. Identity, insight, heart: the only things we leave behind.
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I shrug. "It is what it is," I tell her. "The point is, if someone abandons you, it may be less about you and more about them."
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Busy is just a euphemism for being so focused on what you don't have that you never notice what you do.
It's a defense mechanism. Because if you stop hustling - if you pause - you start wondering why you ever thought you wanted all those things.
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It strikes me that Covid isn't the only thing that can take your breath away.
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The very first things we master as an infant are the last things we lose: the ability to lift one's head from the pillow. The ability to smile.
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"Okay, but what if death wasn't the ending you've been told it is? What if time is like fabric, a bolt that's so long you can't see where it starts or it ends?" She pauses. "Maybe at the moment a person dies, that life gets compressed so small and dense it's like a pinprick in the cloth. It may be that at that point, you enter a new reality. A new stitch in time, basically.
..
"That new reality, it takes place for you at a normal pace, but within that giant fabric of time. What felt like months to you was actually days here, because again, time was compressed the minute you left that other life."
--
I imagine a universe draped with the gauzy textile of millions of lives, tangled and intersecting. I think of needles that might have basted together me and Finn, me and Gabriel, for just a moment in time. I think of yards and yards of cloth as black as night, every fiber twisted into it a different life. In one I am an art specialist. In another, a stranded tourist. There could be infinite versions, some where I can cure cancer, or fall in battle; some where I have a dozen children, break a heart, die young.
"We don't know what reality is," Rayanne says. "We just pretend we do, because it makes us feel like we're in control."
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It's amazing how easily someone can leave your life. It's standing on a beach and stepping back to see the hole of your footprint subsumed by the sand and the sea as if it were never there. Grief, it turns out, is a lot like a one-sided video conversation on an iPad. It's the call with no response, the echo of affection, the shadow cast by love.
But just because you can't see it anymore doesn't make it any less real.
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"You can't plan your life, Finn," I say quietly. "Because then you have a plan. Not a life."
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(Jodi Picoult, Wish You Were Here, 2021)