I am one of those people who go to the public library with no particular book or magazine in mind to check out. Instead, I case the shelves and wait for one or more to call out my name.
This serendipitous approach to reading has been interesting, to say the least. I have come across both gems and duds. But, often I find that the books I get are the ones I especially need at that moment.
Such was the case with Find the Good: Unexpected Life Lessons from a Small-Town Obituary Writer, by bestselling author (and, I later found out, Episcopalian) Heather Lende. It had me at “obituary writer” and the cover: an illustration of a bright, pulsating yellow lemon. I’m a big fan of obituaries (for real), plus, life has been handing me a lot of lemons lately and I figured it might teach me how to make lemonade.
Find the Good came about when Lende was asked to write a short essay about “one piece of wisdom to live by.” Her friend John, she recalls, had two rules for his only child: “Be nice to the dog and don’t do meth.” He grew up to be an upstanding young man. Lende asked herself: what would she, an obituary writer for the Chiliwack News, “rasp before my soul flew up the chimney?” She pretended to be on her deathbed, and the answer came: Find the good.
Writing obituaries of ordinary people who have come and gone in her small, tight-knit community of Haines, Alaska, has taught Lendes “the value of intentionally trying to find the good in people and situations,” she writes. It is a task that can be challenging, but it can be practised, she adds. It can also make for a more meaningful life, something she discovers while digging deeper into the lives of the departed she has to cover in her “beat”—particularly those who die young or are lost to suicide, the lonely, the misfit, the eccentric and oft-misunderstood. “No one wants the last hour of her life to eclipse the seventeen years before it,” she asserts.
Find the Good—described by its jacket as “short chapters that help us unlearn the habit—and it is a habit—of seeing only the negatives”—will likely strike some people as Pollyannish. It’s not always easy to find the good in the face of horrific events and personal trials and tribulations.
But finding the good is not about ignoring harms done and pains endured. It can be about looking beyond the often incomprehensible that’s in front of us and not giving up hope for better days ahead.
Lende observes what most of us often witness in tragic incidents around the world—”awful events are followed by dozens and dozens of good deeds.” Suffering, she writes, “in all its forms and our response to it, binds us together across dinner tables, neighbourhoods, towns and cities, and even time. Bad doings bring out the best in people.”
Finding the good isn’t an attitude one is supposed to summon up just for big, dramatic events—as it is, daily life can be a tough slog. As Lende reminds us, “We are all writing our own obituary every day by how we live. The best news is that there’s still time for additions and revisions before it goes to press.”
* * *
From everyone at the Anglican Journal, Happy Easter!
