Under the Dome

I originally posted this "review" to Goodreads. I thought I'd give it a little extra rotation over here. Yesterday, on day 81 of his stay at York Hospital, Pop was moved to HealthSouth Rehabilitation Hospital to begin the intensive and arduous task of re-learning to stand, then walk, and swallow again. He is on the upswing and I am so proud of how hard he's been fighting. I hope I've inherited some of those genes, and at least a little bit of his determination.

Originally posted to Goodreads:

This isn't really a review. It's a story about the circumstances under which I read this book. But, given those circumstances, I thought I'd take the liberty of posting this instead of a review. The book, by the way, was fantastic.

June 17, 2010

11:59 p.m.

Under the Dome

This has been a difficult year. I’ve lost count of how many funerals there have been for people I deeply admired, and some for people I deeply loved. I resigned from my job, and, in a sense, my community. To hide out and catch my breath.

And then, just when you think you cannot possibly shoulder any more, life has a way of throwing a Molotov cocktail through your living room window while you’re inside, lying on the couch.

Several long months after my aunt passed away, after the nightmare of discovering the secret life she was living, I found a Borders gift card she’d given me for Christmas only two months before she died. It just turned up one day, appearing in a gift bag filled with what I thought were empty boxes and envelopes, cast aside on the floor next to the daybed in the guest room. It was unmistakable, how it popped up in the same fashion as one of her unexpected phone calls used to come: a pleasant, eccentric little surprise.

I carried the gift card around in my purse for about a week, before making a trip to Borders to get the newest Stephen King book, Under the Dome. Although I often say that Stephen King is the reason I love to read, the reason I love to write, I couldn’t bring myself to buy the hefty hardcover. It tops out at 1074 pages and carried a $35 price tag. I reasoned that people without jobs should wait for paperback. No matter that I’d never in my life waited for a Stephen King book to come out in paperback. I’d never waited past the release date to purchase one, and rarely a week to finish reading one. Things had changed, but one thing remained the same – even in death, my aunt had managed to get me a wonderful gift I never would have splurged on for myself.

The book wasn’t easy to tote around for a few stolen minutes here and there, but I tried. The most I’d get to spend with it at a stretch was during the mandatory 20-minute wait after my allergy shots every other week, so I eventually just kept it in the car for those sessions. I figured it would take me the entire summer to read it.

I was about 100 pages deep, two months after I first cracked the book open, when my grandfather was rushed to the hospital on a Friday morning. I had taken the second shift hanging around the ICU waiting room, relieving my mother, who had spent the afternoon there. She came home to stay with my son, and threw a sweatshirt and a book into a bag for me to take to my grandmother. “A book?,” I asked. She shrugged and said any distraction would be welcome. So when I got to the hospital, I grabbed my own book off the passenger seat and took that in with me, too.

The next five days are a blur of waiting, waiting, waiting in the windowless room where surgeons and specialists would appear at irregular intervals to bring news of my grandfather’s fight for his life. And in between, unable to bear the slow crawl of the clock, I opened the giant book on my lap and read.

A constantly shifting cast of characters moved in and out of the waiting room. At one point, a nurse peeked her head into the room to ask the waiting room attendant, “do you want that book now?” The attendant nodded, and the nurse returned from her break with a copy of the book I was reading. She noticed me sitting there, lost in the book, and said, “heeey! She’s reading the same one!” She pointed to the attendant. “I’m loaning it to her to read on vacation.” She came into the room and sat down on the couch next to me. We talked for several delicious, comforting minutes about Stephen King and John Irving. Just two people having a normal conversation, one of them wearing scrubs.

Other people – hospital staff, other people waiting for news of loved ones, even some of my own family members – commented. “That’s a big book,” one man remarked after settling onto the other half of the loveseat I occupied in the large, and otherwise empty room in the wee hours of the first night. I agreed and stuck my nose back in.

When I got to be somewhere around 700 pages in, a panic started settling in around the edges of my mind. What was going to happen when I finished the book? How could I face what was going on without it? But still I pressed on, reading, reading, reading. I am, after all, Stephen King’s Constant Reader.

Yesterday, Pop made it through his third major surgery and to a point where one doctor finally said to us that he thought Pop might make it through. We all breathed a sigh of cautiously optimistic relief and I opened my book.

Tonight, lying on my stomach on my bed, on top of the covers, I finished Under the Dome. I cried silently for the last 20 or so pages. The entire thing was a pedal-to-the-metal page-turner, would have been so even under the most typical circumstances here on my side of the looking-glass. But the intense crescendo of the final scenes wasn’t the only thing that made me weep. I was crying for knowing I’d soon be crawling out from behind the book’s protective shield. Crying over the fact that I’d have to rejoin a world less perfectly choreographed.

I finished reading the author’s note in the final pages, closed the back cover, and lay my head down in my arms and sobbed. I discovered I was also crying from the weight of knowing that I could never do that. Never write anything like it.

And so here I sit, in this flawed world, where we never know what’s going to happen next, or just how much we can bear. There is nothing to do but keep turning the pages, and enjoy the story along the way.