The Still Point of the Turning World
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3.9 • 42 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Like all mothers, Emily Rapp had ambitious plans for her first and only child, Ronan. He would be smart, loyal, physically fearless, and level-headed, but fun. He would be good at crossword puzzles like his father. He would be an avid skier like his mother. Rapp would speak to him in foreign languages and give him the best education.
But all of these plans changed when Ronan was diagnosed at nine months old with Tay-Sachs disease, a rare and always-fatal degenerative disorder. Ronan was not expected to live beyond the age of three; he would be permanently stalled at a developmental level of six months. Rapp and her husband were forced to re-evaluate everything they thought they knew about parenting. They would have to learn to live with their child in the moment; to find happiness in the midst of sorrow; to parent without a future.
The Still Point of the Turning World is the story of a mother’s journey through grief and beyond it. Rapp’s response to her son’s diagnosis was a belief that she needed to “make my world big”—to make sense of her family’s situation through art, literature, philosophy, theology and myth. Drawing on a broad range of thinkers and writers, from C.S. Lewis to Sylvia Plath, Hegel to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Rapp learns what wisdom there is to be gained from parenting a terminally ill child. In luminous, exquisitely moving prose she re-examines our most fundamental assumptions about what it means to be a good parent, to be a success, and to live a meaningful life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rapp's next work after her memoir about her childhood disability and foot amputation (Poster Child) delineates a bracing, heartbreaking countdown in the life of her terminally ill son. At age nine months, Ronan was diagnosed with Tay-Sachs, a rare, degenerative disease, involving the lack of an enzyme, that is always fatal, striking the parents as a complete surprise, despite the author's having been tested during standard prenatal screening. An affliction most prevalent among Ashkenazi Jews, Tay-Sachs actually has more than a hundred mutations. Ronan's "death sentence" was for Rapp and her husband, Rick, living in Santa Fe, a time of grief, reckoning, and learning how to live, and her elegant, restrained work flows with reflections and excerpts from writers and poets like Mary Shelley, Pablo Neruda, and Sylvia Plath, as well as supporters who helped her during the difficult unraveling of her son's condition. Writing about Ronan allowed her to claim the sorrow and truly look at her son the way he was. Her narrative does not follow Ronan as far as his death, but gleans lessons from Buddhism and elsewhere in order that Rapp could "walk through this fire without being consumed by it." Unflinching and unsentimental, Rapp's work lends a useful, compassionate, healing message for suffering parents and caregivers.
Customer Reviews
The still point of the turning world
My father died of leukemia almost 1 year ago and my reading has gravitated toward those who have similarly lost loved ones. Typically they have chronicled the disease and death. Emily takes us to the grief and acceptance of the impending loss we all feel when we have the knowledge that death is near. Certainly not what I expected, however, what I needed.
Remarkably insightful and poetic
This book challenges your assumptions on what parenting is; juxtaposing the common practice of raising a child while focusing relentlessly on that child's future and the practice of parenting a child without one. It's not a simple tear jerker, but a treatise on the nature of being a parent when the rug is pulled out from under you. It couldn't have been easy to write, but I'm glad she did it.
Disappointed
I downloaded this after People magazine gave it 4 stars and was the book of the week. I was in the mood for a tear jerker and this had too much rambling in it. She quoted so many authors throughout the book; it bored me. I wanted to hear the details about Ronan and their last days with him. Maybe I'm morbid, but I wanted to know about Ronan's last breath and if she was holding him. You know, the typical mother thing, being there for his first breath and last breath.