I'm a bit of a sucker for memoirs. I even read A Million Little Pieces after James Frey was deemed a fraud. (He's still working, by the way. No such thing as bad press, right?) I just finished The Middle Place by Kelly Corrigan.

Jacki Donaldson read and posted about the book a while back. But I read it after a new friend of mine recommended it. She recently went through the excruciating experience of losing her mother to ALS while living an airplane ride apart. I am currently going through the same thing.

The Middle Place instead involves dealing with cancer, but the themes involving parent-child relationships, distance, disease, and faith are the same. Kelly, who survived her cancer, struggles with all of it, but particularly faith. She is baffled by the Buddhist truth of detachment, "even to people." She still struggles with faith to this day, several years later. I struggle with it a bit as well and I suspect all of us do to some degree. It's the very nature of faith, after all. It's transparent, intangible.

It really doesn't comfort me to think of my mother as having eternal life in a better place where we'll meet again someday. It comforts me to have her here. But I don't have that choice. Life on Earth is valuable because it doesn't last. And what puts my mind ever so slightly at ease is watching the pure joy in my mother's face -- despite her inability to talk or participate -- as she watches her granddaughter play or cuddles with her on the couch during all the visits our finances can muster. I sense a peace in her that gives me the same peace. A peace that faith hasn't really given me. Yet.