For One More Day

Mitch Albom's Tuesdays With Morrie was a book that touched me deeply at a time when I was struggling with the loss of my friend and mentor, Richard Price. So when I saw his newer book, For One More Day, I had to read it.

What a stunner. I have read many books about the dead returning to save a loved one in despair, but this one was so immediate, so real, that my eyes were wet. That doesn't happen often when I read a book.

It made me think of my own mother, and it also made me want to hand the book to Jason and tell him, read this before it is too late.

There are chapters headed, Times I Did Not Stand Up for My Mother, juxtaposed against other chapters titled, Times My Mother Stood Up for Me.

Somehow, really, we expect this relationship between mothers and children. Mother gives her all, and the mother in this book, Posey, certainly did. She stood up for her son whenever she perceived a threat to him. On the other hand her son, Chick, didn't stand up for her when he thought it was a contest between his father and his mother, or his mother and the outside world.

Sometimes, though, he did. His parents divorced and so his mother became an outcast, with other women afraid she would charm their husbands away from them. When Chick caught some boys spying on his mother with binoculars and saying, "Look at the divorcee," as if it were a smutty word, he did react and beat them up.

But, he felt he abandoned her to follow his father's dream of making him into a baseball star, and she succumbed to a heart attack. Who hasn't felt he or she wasn't there enough for Mom?

Even though it's in the nature of things, it felt deeply satisfying to see Chick get his one more day with his Mom, and accompany her in the spirit world to minister to people who were about to die. Wonderful story of salvation, because when he awakens, Chick sets about repairing his own broken family, cleaning up his alcoholism, and becoming a part of his daughter's life again, where once he was such an embarrassment that she didn't even invite him to her wedding.

And Mitch Albom dedicates the book to his own mother and reveals that at least one incident in the story came directly from his own life; there's a photograph to prove it.

I guess it is fitting that I read this right before Mother's Day. It is the perfect Mother's Day present... from a mother to a child.