I’ve been spending a lot of time lately reading and grasping for some thread of happiness. I usually find this in Christmas romance books, so I tend to devour them by the handful. A few weeks ago, the book Christmas at the Shelter Inn by RaeAnne Thayne arrived at my doorstep with a book order. On the surface, it looks like any other Christmas romance novel, so I stuck it on the shelf to read eventually.
Then, the book kept appearing in my life. Facebook feeds posts by other authors, Amazon recommendations, and book e-mails from other authors. Maybe it wasn’t as much as it seemed, but for a few days, this book was EVERYWHERE I looked.
I finally gave in about a week ago and scooped the book off my studio shelf and stuck it in my purse. Slowly, I started reading it when I was sitting in the car waiting to pick my oldest son up from school or waiting for the bus to bring my youngest home.
A few chapters in, when the main character Natalie starts talking about how her mother died from cancer, I almost put the book down. Almost.
But, something kept dragging me back to the story.
For starters, the adorable romance between Griffin and Natalie is sweet, wholesome, and so close to real you can almost see them in a holiday market, trying not to watch each other but failing. It’s the warm fuzzies I wanted.
What I wasn’t prepared for was all the ***EXTRA*** emotions that came with the story. Griffin lost his father to a drunk driving incident that killed several young town members. Natalie lost her mother to cancer, her father ran away afterward due to his grief at the loss, and her brother took to dangerous levels of drinking which killed him in an accident a year later. Natalie has become a runner, hiding from the emotions of all of the losses she endured.
Through all of this, I kept my composure and kept trucking along through the story. I knew Natalie and Griffin would end up together. That isn’t what I kept reading for. Natalie’s father reemerged and tried to reconnect with her and I wanted to know how she would deal with that. I kept reading for the big fight, the part of the book where Natalie lets her father really have it for abandoning her and her siblings after her mother died.
When the blowup finally came, instead of finding relief and justification for Natalie’s loss, I found myself crying like a baby in the driver’s seat of my Ford Focus, sitting outside a high school, alone and totally broken for my own losses. Natalie’s father says something on page 275 that literally broke me, resonating with my own struggles without knowing me at all.
“After your mom died, I was a mess”…”Even though we knew for a long time what was coming, I just…fell apart” (Thayne, 275).
We knew my dad would eventually succumb to the cancer. And we also knew we were on borrowed time the entire time. Yet, somewhere inside, I refused to let myself believe he would ever truly be gone. This man, this strong stubborn man who I never saw get sick and who never let an injury keep him from doing anything he wanted to do, this man who didn’t show emotions or cry, the man I thought my whole life was invincible, would never die. My father was the most stable and consistent person in my entire life. I convinced myself that nothing could ever change that.
I was wrong. I couldn’t have been more wrong. The absence of him is everywhere and everywhere I look there are reminders of him. I cannot escape it. Often, I try to numb my mind to the pain of the loss. Often, it hurts too much to be truly awake to the world. I see his pictures and I refuse to believe he’s really gone. I think about the past and I can still smell him, hear him, see him and I can’t believe he is gone.
I’ve never felt such a connection to a fictional cast as this book. Beyond this pain, it also dragged up pains I previously tried to bury. Griffin lost a child three days after birth. This connected me to him because of the loss of my grandson Donavan two years ago and the loss of all the babies that could have been.
Loss is such a tremendous weight. Grief slips into your body, into your bones, into your blood, and wraps itself around everything, squeezing until you can’t breathe, until it takes all of your efforts just to survive, leaving nothing for anything or anyone else.
Someday, maybe, I will be able to handle the weight of my grief. For now, please know I am treading water, sometimes taking in too much and sputtering until my head is above again, but never staying down long enough to drown. It will take time to learn to swim this way, but I’m in for the long haul. I’m trying to write a little every day, trying to find a balance between crying for hours and getting stuff done.
Until next time,
Cathy Marie Bown
If you are looking for another emotional Christmas romance, try my book, A Covid Christmas Story!
Works Cited: Thayne, RaeAnne. Christmas at the Shelter Inn. Canary Street Press, 2023.
Cathy Marie Bown 