Waking 1.4

I feel really deceived by Matthew Sanford. The book started off gently enough, with him sliding out of bed to   practice pranayama. I thought, oh, it's unfortunate that he is paralyzed, but look what he can do. Yay! When suddenly, I get thrown into the hospital room when he finds out about his paralysis. Well, I guess that's good authorship because I'm only feeling a small fraction of what he felt.

At this point, I'm only in the fourth chapter of the book, but he does an excellent job with character development. I feel as though I know his family personally. I have a lot of compassion for them and I hardly know what to do with it, as this is a book, and I can't exactly ship casserole or cake to this grieving family in their past state...I am so proud of them all. Laura Kathleen's boyfriend was so consistent and intentional about sticking around when I'm sure it was devastatingly hard looking into the eyes of his beloved's family members, seeing her through them. Perhaps that also made it easier? Matt's mom, Paula was incredibly strong, losing almost half of her family, fighting for her son, and keeping everyone grounded. And, of course, Matt is a champ. It broke my heart reading that he said to his first girlfriend he would rather die than live the rest of his life in a wheelchair. I thought, what a tactless thing to say! and then, bless his heart for bravely enduring the pain of the accident and learning to live life with limited mobility.

Reading Waking is reminding me of what unfortunate places hospitals can be...Sanford talks about the awful food, and what a joy it was when he received a room with a television. Good grief! I've been fortunate enough to not spend a lot of time in hospitals in my life thus far. It seems to me that in a place with so much suffering, people should be living luxuriously! Maybe this is me being happy-go-lucky, but it makes sense. If I'm sitting upright for days in recovery, I'd like some current magazines and a foot massage. Perhaps people with money arrange that kind of stuff themselves...Anyway, if hospitals had stuff like that I suppose no one would want to leave, and that'd be a problem for the new batch of hurt people.

The part of Waking that I read most recently was Sanford's family's prophecies about the accident. Wow. These are interesting to read. It's amazing, first of all, that they remembered all of that, and secondly how applicable they were to the accident! I wonder how many times we miss things like this in our own lives. How could they have known beforehand, though? It's not as if they could have escaped the accident with those clues. It seems to have brought them closure, and that's what is most important.