Kaile Judge - My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry by: Fredrik Backman - Personal Reading Reflection

    I am not one to read fiction books, but after reading countless books about self-improvement and getting things done, I decided I needed a break. I picked up a dusty book I got as a gift two years ago titled, "My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry", and yes I know, it is a very long title. This book has been one of my favorites that I have read so far. It is an innocent book about a grandmother, Granny, and a grand-daughter, Elsa, and a make-believe place they travel to every night, the Land-of-Almost-Awake. There are many kingdoms in this Land-of-Almost-Awake, but Granny and Elsa's favorite was the kingdom of Miamas. This book has many intricate parts to it, and the only way to understand is to read it for yourself. This is an innocent book, however, when reading slowly, you can see some heavy issues addressed. 

    The first of these is when Granny says, "death's greatest power is not that it can make people die, but that it can make people want to stop living." How interesting it is that such a well-known fact has never been so eloquently said. Just a few weeks ago I was having a conversation about the difference between death and dying. My argument was that dying is not scary, but that death lives among us. Death brings grief and sorrow and pain and loneliness. Death brings the feelings and personalities out of us that we didn't know were there.  Death takes lives, which causes sorrow, but that sorrow causes people to be drawn to death. How powerful something is that can cause so much pain but also be the remedy for it. How strange it is that this remedy brings baggage in a weight that cannot be carried. What is it about death that scares people so much, but draws them so close?    

    Going off of this, Granny says later in the novel, "People in the real world always say, when something terrible happens, that the sadness and loss and aching pain of the heart will 'lessen as time passes,' but it isn't true. Sorrow and loss are constant, but if we all had to go through our whole lives carrying them the whole time, we wouldn't be able to stand it. The sadness would paralyze us. So in the end we just pack it into bags and find somewhere to leave it." So often I find myself picking up bags in the form of emotion-filled letters, or sentiments, and leaving them in the trash or in a fire to burn. The real question here though is that just because you leave it somewhere, is it really gone? Just because I wrote a letter to myself saying sorry, is the anger I hold gone? Does it disappear just because I want it to, or do I simply convince myself it is gone and move on, only for it to manifest itself later in another way? 

    Baggage is a strange thing to think about because it cannot be seen but we all know it is real. I wonder what would happen if we were to completely and fully lay it all down and walk away and it actually stay there? I don't think it is possible to ever fully put down some things, I do believe that there is grace and mercy but I think some bags are meant to be with us so we can grow and learn. 

Lastly, Granny is explaining to Else about people who are sad or bitter towards the world. Granny says, "not all monsters were monsters in the beginning. Some are monsters born of sorrow." Going back to what I said before, sometimes in the most challenging times of life, we see the sides of ourselves that we didn't know were there. Sorrow brings many things, and sometimes it gives birth to monsters. Granny further explains this by saying, "not all monsters look like monsters. There are some that carry their monstrosities inside." Many people are put together on the outside, but they are just piles of debris on the inside. Sometimes people who have the loveliest smiles have the ugliest of hearts and the cruelest of souls.