Memoirs about love, fate and death are easy to come by. Everyone in the world could write one, and many have. Though many are written badly, and for evil gain, the good ones have much to offer. If the author is honest, not prone to embellishment or over sentimentality, you get a glimpse into what another person thinks life is about. Some would say that Christians already have a book about what life is about, so why read about life through another lense, especially through the lense of an unbeliever? Well, I would tell you that the merit of such a read is a broken heart. As our hearts ought to be for every single person out there, stumbling through life in the dark.
I had wanted to find a book on New York City. A historical novel about the city's era of birth. Yet somehow, I ended up with the name Carole Radziwill, perhaps because much of the book was set in New York. I began reading it knowing nothing about the story, but it turned out that she was married, indirectly, into the Kennedy family. Her husband was John Kennedy Jr.'s cousin. I have always avoided reading anything on celebrities or their lives, under the assumption that these things are spawned purely from a desire for publicity, but this book didn't seem to fit the usual mold. It was so understated, the cover muted. And it was haunting from the very first paragraph. I read on.
The author, Carol Radziwill, is a journalist. She writes like a journalist. She didn't wax and wane or play on the emotions, she just told her story. And her story utterly devastated me. Against all odds, born of a blue collar family with no connections, and without remarkable beauty, she married into the Radziwill family, a Polish royal line. Because her husband, Anthony, and John Jr. were like brothers, she becomes entwined in the lives of both John and his wife Carolyn. The four of them became deeply connected, and clearly grew more dependent on one another as the story goes on, but by the end of August 1999 Carol was the only one of them still alive. In one month Kennedy and Carolyn died in a plane crash and her husband died of cancer.
These bare facts are hard enough to digest as they are, without any meat hung on them, so to read the words of the more complete story, I can tell you, physically hurts. She starts out as an empty woman without direction or meaning, and ends an empty woman without direction or meaning. A hollow shell. An empty husk. Everything in between is what she came to believe really meant something. And then it was all taken away. Her book is called What Remains but I found not a trace of anything remaining at the end of her story, once they were all torn from her. I felt her panic rise as she realizes that the three people she has come to believe are her life are gone. Don't leave me! Don't leave!
How do godless people survive the pain? How does this woman still walk and breathe and appear on Oprah saying things like, "I'm dating again, yes, it's been long enough." Like all people without God, she must have invented a means by which to be comforted. Reading between the lines, it seems her comfort of choice went by the name of Fate. She must have talked herself out of utter despair by embracing the concept of Impersonal Happenings, as though an ancient goddess exists, who flicks her wrist, with a blank face, to impart good or bad fortune to the world. Oh, what comfort!
I think I am learning a bit about the pain of the prophets crying spare them in their hearts. I found myself praying for this woman who I do not know. Please break into her empty heart, Lord, and show her something that has meaning. My second heart response was praise for the deep, rich meaning our lives have, no matter what we endure, when there is a God that loves us more personally than we can comprehend. Thank God that the events of this world are indeed personal. That we are not left to free float in chaos, meaninglessness and pure chance. That we are loved. And that when the whole world is taken from us, everything still remains and more.
