Review: Heart-wrenching story of loss, motherhood, and hope
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 09 9, 2012
Jennifer Weaver is the "statistic-spouting wife of a CPA" that perhaps pushes her husband harder than most.  Richard Weaver is the man she's loved since high school, who can "think circles around anyone," takes his chances with the stock market, and is so depressed, her son Matthew notes tearfully, that sometimes he doesn't notice his pride and joy is even there.  When his sudden suicide throws her world upside down, Jennifer must examine the realities of life- her relationship with her father, her daughter Catherine's pride, those two weeks of silence she once endured during a fight with her husband, which show her "with no uncertainty I was alone."  From postpartum depression to meeting a new man and protecting her children- she worries that the kids will think they can get something for nothing, and in one moving scene describes the pain she feels when she's late to pick up her kids- this is a sweetly written and wonderfully inspiring story of survival.  In a bittersweet excerpt, Jennifer recalls putting Catherine's crib together with her husband, and her disappointment when she discovers that things like cribs and bicycles do not come fully assembled will at once make you laugh and cry.  And her attempts at finding release with another man- the incorrigible Nat Witton- are equally relatable and heart-wrenching.  "I want to have roots again, to belong to a place, to identify with it," she says hopefully.  This story shows that everyone has another chance, and teaches readers the importance of a "real letting go of life, one string at a time."