Wild: A Journey from Lost to Found

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best books of 2012 – nonfiction - 'Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail,' by Cheryl Strayed". CSMonitor.com. 2012-12-03 . Retrieved 2012-12-24. archive.

December 3, 2012: Wild was named No. 6 best non-fiction book of 2012 by The Christian Science Monitor. [5]You finally got what you wanted,” Paul had said when we bade each other goodbye in Minneapolis ten days before. On her first day in the hospital, a nurse offered my mother morphine, but she refused. “Morphine is what they give to dying people,” she said. “Morphine means there’s no hope.” Here you are,” I said to the woman, sliding the form across the coun- ter in her direction, though she didn’t turn to me for several moments. She was watching a small television that sat on a table behind the coun- ter. The evening news. Something about the O. J. Simpson trial.

Leif didn’t come to visit her. Karen came once after I’d insisted she must. I was in heartbroken and enraged disbelief. “I don’t like seeing her this way,” my sister would offer weakly when we spoke, and then burst into tears. I couldn’t speak to my brother—where he was during those weeks was a mystery to Eddie and me. One friend told us he was stay- ing with a girl named Sue in St. Cloud. Another spotted him ice fishing on Sheriff Lake. I didn’t have time to do much about it, consumed as I was each day at my mother’s side, holding plastic pans for her to retch into, adjusting the impossible pillows again and again, hoisting her up and onto the potty chair the nurses had propped near her bed, cajoling her to eat a bite of food that she’d vomit up ten minutes later. Mostly, I watched her sleep, the hardest task of all, to see her in repose, her face still pinched with pain. Each time she moved, the IV tubes that dangled all around her swayed and my heart raced, afraid she’d disturb the nee- dles that attached the tubes to her swollen wrists and hands. Honey,” she said eventually, gazing at me, her hand reaching to stroke the top of my head. It was a word she used often throughout my childhood, delivered in a highly specific tone. This is not the way I wanted it to be, that single honey said, but it was the way it was. It was this very acceptance of suffering that annoyed me most about my mom, her unending optimism and cheer. My mom had been dead a week when I kissed another man. And another a week after that. I only made out with them and the others that followed—vowing not to cross a sexual line that held some meaning to me—but still I knew I was wrong to cheat and lie. I felt trapped by my own inability to either leave Paul or stay true, so I waited for him to leave me, to go off to graduate school alone, though of course he refused.Just behind that longing was the urge to call Paul. He was my ex- husband now, but he was still my best friend. As much as I’d pulled away from him in the years after my mother’s death, I’d also leaned hard into him. In the midst of my mostly silent agonizing over our marriage, we’d had good times, been, in oddly real ways, a happy couple. A candid, inspiring narrative of the author’s brutal physical and psychological journey through a wilderness of despair to a renewed sense of self," This novel was gripping from the start. There was a bit of mystery to it. At times it was quite sad but also beautiful and eye-opening. It was fascinating to learn about the child raised in the wild and how she learned to adapt to her new surroundings. What are you thinking about?” I asked her. There was a song coming over the waiting room speakers. A song without words, but my mother knew the words anyway and instead of answering my question she sang them softly to me. “Paper roses, paper roses, oh how real those roses seemed to be,” she sang. She put her hand on mine and said, “I used to listen to that song when I was young. It’s funny to think of that. To think about listening to the same song now. I would’ve never known.”