The Rules of Inheritance

by Claire Bidwell Smith – Text Publishing - RRP NZ$37.00
I reviewed this on Radio NZ National, 7 March 2012

At age fourteen, Claire Bidwell Smith-an only child- learned that both of her parents had cancer. When the inevitable happens, and Claire is alone in the world, she is inconsolable and it is only years later when Claire eventually falls in love, marries, and becomes a mother that she emerges from her fog of grief. In contrast with a conventional framework, she tells her story using Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ five stages of grief as a window into her experience- let me remind you that these stages are Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. So the book is divided into five parts and each begins with a quote from Kubler-Ross.   1.   There is grace in denial. It is nature’s way of letting in only as much as we can handle. 2.   Anger surfaces only when you are feeling safe enough to know you will probably survive whatever comes. 3.   We will do anything not to feel the pain of this loss. We remain in the past, trying to negotiate our way out of the hurt. 4.   Invite your depression to pull up a chair with you in front of the fire, and sit with it, without looking for a way to escape....When you allow yourself to experience depression, it will leave you as soon as it has served its purpose in your loss. 5.   In a strange way, as we move through grief, healing brings us closer to the person we loved. A new relationship begins. We learn to live with the loved one we lost.  While the memoir is told in five parts and she deals with them in Kubler-Ross’ consecutive order her account in fact is  not dealt with in a lineal fashion, rather it jumps about the place although each of the five parts begins with the author as a teenager and then progresses through the years to adulthood. Each chapter starts by giving the year and her age – e.g Chapter 4 is headed:  1997 – I’m Eighteen. It is a moving and at times very sad story as first her mother dies from colon cancer when she is 18, and then when she is 24 her father dies from prostate cancer and also about this time a close girlfriend dies of leukemia. Because she is an only child she is close to her parents who are somewhat older than the parents of her friends – her mother was 40 when she was born and her father 57. She becomes especially close to her father after her mother dies and they have a number of adventures together including a wonderfully described trip to Prague for him to research what happened to his lost aircrew in 1944 when he was a bomber pilot and his plane was shot down. So while The Rules of Inheritance can best be described as a memoir of grief it is not all doom and gloom. While in the Czech Republic she is able to say to herself – “As much as I miss my mother, I am glad she died first. Otherwise I would have buried my father without ever having known him”. And later when they are back in California and she is at a primary school with her father who is telling his story about being a bomber pilot in WW2 she describes it thus: The kids are fidgety and distracted as my dad talks, but he doesn’t seem to notice. I lean against a doorway and I watch the kids. I know they just see an old man going on about a war they don’t understand, but I see so much more. I see the man who swept my mother off her feet one warm June morning. The man who rubbed my back on the nights when I couldn’t sleep after she was gone. I see a man who learned to fly an airplane at age twenty, a man who dedicated to fighting something bigger than himself. A man who survived when so many others died. I see a man who made his life worthwhile. Nice; so it is not only about grief but it is about love and life and while parts of it are immeasurably sad and quite affected me, (not a book to be read in public places I suggest), I’m glad to say the story does have a happy ending when at age 30 she marries and quickly has a daughter of her own. This is not really a handbook about how to cope with loss as she deals with the dark and self-destructive aspects of grieving and talks frankly of her problems with alcohol and relationships, though somehow she does manage to come out the other side of her despair and loneliness all the stronger for it. And in that sense it is a quite inspiring story. Interestingly too she is now a grief counsellor at a hospice in California. I believe anyone working in this field would find the book of immense help. Not sure where she got the title as there is nothing about inheritance in a legal sense but it may be that she is just referring to the grief she inherited. Some readers might also be reminded of a book published in 2000, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius where Dave Eggers chronicled his stewardship of his younger brother following the death from cancer of his parents.