"torch" by cheryl strayed

Cheryl Strayed is a writer who excels at writing about loss. Loss of one's own life, of a loved one, of the life before losing someone. The novel is about the life of a family before and after the death of Teresa, the mother of two children, Claire and Joshua, and the wife of their stepfather, Bruce.

Cancer is a common disease now. Many die of it. So, naturally, stories about cancer are pretty common; and yet each is extremely personal and special--the desperation, the tears, the heartbreaking moments of intimacy and sorrow. Strayed captures these with such honesty it is really touching; and by telling the story from four different perspectives, she makes it clear that in grief we are all alone.

on language

Kaho Nashiki, in her essay collection "Gururi no koto," wrote this about language:

I believe the purest skimming of communication is conveying the air around what we want to say. Language is very important to me, but sometimes I wonder if humans began to roll faster down toward destruction when they discovered language. There's no way we could abandon it now, though, so we just have to say about this, too, "Oh well." When we are filled with this sort of compassion and acceptance, we might understand each other without needing any words.
It's true language is troublesome; it's hard to deal with. But I believe my job is to weave a piece of cloth called a story, with fabrics called words, that offers different colors and patterns from different angles or with different lighting. I want to be an artisan who simply keeps producing work, and to be that I just can't lose faith in this helplessly unreliable thing; language.

That's exactly how I feel about language. I keep wondering if it's a blessing or a curse that we humans have language. If the most important thing in communication is to "convey the air around what we want to say," and it seems so to me, all we need would be just a smile, a hug, a gentle pat on the shoulder, things like that. Too often we use language instead of those and make things get worse. When we get into this bad spiral, it's not easy to stop; the more words we use, the further apart we drift away.

But, like Nashiki, I still want to believe in language, what great things it can do.

I just got an e-mail from a friend who left here. It's been almost two months since I last heard from her, and I was surprised how happy it made me. Her words were kind, just as they always had been. It made me smile. That's something only language can do. Without language, there would be no way I could feel her presence the way I did through her words when we are 60000 miles apart.

But the words themselves maybe don't matter. It's hearing her voice, imagining her smile behind them that gave me the warm feeling in the heart. That's more than what the words conveyed literally; that's "the air" part that wouldn't need words to be understood. And yet this time, because of our distance, it would've been impossible if it hadn't been language.

It's times like this that I feel maybe language is, after all, a blessing. For all the bad it might do, we need it sometimes to reach to each other. We still can't forget language is a "helplessly unreliable thing," though, because if we start relying on words too much, we stop seeing what's most important, which is the person's gaze, touch, voice, laughter, things that are behind and beyond the words. And when we write, we see how we are always trying to get where language may never take us. That's why we want to doubt it, while never losing faith in it.