WHAT LOOKS LIKE BRAVERY

Memoir of a young life punctuated by devastating grief.

“I am extraordinarily privileged in nearly every way, but what I’m most grateful for now is my parents’ belief, passed down like any other inheritance, that there’s more beauty in the world than horror.” So writes Braitman, director of the Writing and Storytelling Program at the Stanford University School of Medicine and author of Animal Madness, who experienced plenty of horror in childhood, as her father, a surgeon who wanted more than anything else to be an avocado rancher, found himself stricken with an aggressive bone cancer. It was a “death sentence in 1981,” when “chemotherapy for bone cancer was new and toxic, still in the experimental stage.” Though he outlived the odds, he eventually succumbed. Braitman writes movingly about how he kept appearing in often wonderful ways in her life, such as the bespoke stitches he left as his signature in the hearts of his patients. “The book of the heart is immortal,” she writes. “Or at least it’s longer than we think.” His death, like all deaths, was an occasion for lack of closure, and it did not help much in preparing the author for the deaths of other loved ones. There are a few unsatisfying turns as Braitman grasps for direction and love against the knowledge, hardly secret, that everyone we know will die and everything we know will disappear, but eventually she resolves herself, mostly, to that truth. Some moments are a little forced, but, after a spell of world traveling, earning a doctorate, racking up honors and achievements, and, most of all, enduring the ordinary griefs of life, the author has prevailed. One of her closing realizations is worth the cover price alone: “There is no such thing as happily ever after. There is only happily sad or sadly happy.”

An affecting investigation of loss, sorrow, and the search for meaning.