When a path calls to you but may hurt others
Jeanie’s father can hear the final thoughts of the dead. This gift makes him the most sought-after undertaker in their Irish town, Kilcross: He relays messages to the bereaved, reassures the recently passed and sometimes keeps their confessions, almost like a priest.
It’s clear at an early age that Jeanie has inherited his gift. She’s drawing pictures in the embalming room one afternoon and looks up to chirp that “the lady” wants other music played.
Nobody questions this: Listening to the dead is a gift that runs in her family. But as the book opens it’s clear that this gift is about to cement the course of Jeanie’s future, whether she wants it to or not.
Now her parents are retiring early and moving away, and they are leaving the mortuary to
Jeanie and her embalmer husband, Niall. This sends Jeanie into a panic — did she ever actually decide this is what she wanted to do? Hadn’t she as a young woman fallen in love with globe-trotting photographer Fionn and dreamed of fleeing with him to London?
Instead, the burden of her family’s expectations nearly crushing her, she chose to stay and marry sweet, dutiful Niall, who fit into her family perhaps better than she did. Now, at 32, she finds herself at a crossroads again.
“It was like there was this other, wonderful version of me out there that perhaps I was supposed to be living,” she says. But obligation is not shrugged off lightly. Jeanie needs to shut off all other voices (living and dead) and figure out her future once and for all.
In a novel that moves between past and present, Anne Griffin (author of the highly praised “When All Is Said”) writes about what happens in a life when you’re afraid to make choices that might hurt those who count on you — and what happens when you do.