I Loved Every Minute Of It!

Sipsworth by Simon Van Booy is the kind of book that you don’t want to let go of until you’re finished, and when you are, you feel full of something deep in your heart, have a catch in your throat, and eyes that want to water. The next day, you go back to the book to save the passages you couldn’t take the time to when you were in a hurry to find out what happens next. Each passage you locate leads you closer to understanding fully what Helen Cartwright is experiencing throughout the book. 

Another book released recently, The Life Impossible by Matt Haig, covers similar terrain, “Once upon a time there was an old woman who lived the most boring life in the universe. That woman rarely left her bungalow, except to see the doctor, help at the charity shop, or visit the cemetery. She didn’t garden any more. The grass was overgrown, and the flowerbeds were full of weeds. She ordered her weekly shopping. She lived in the Midlands…She was only seventy-two, but since her husband passed away four years before, and her Pomeranian–Bernard–shortly after, she had felt completely alone. In fact, she had felt alone for more than thirty years. Ever since April 2nd 1992, to be precise. The date she lost her entire meaning and purpose and never really found it again…of all the sad moments of the past, it was still that April date long ago that reverberated most profoundly. The death of her son, Daniel, had been the hardest and most devastating, and when a tragedy is as large as that it leads to other sadnesses and failures, the way a trunk leads to branches. But life went on.”

In Sipsworth Helen Cartwright is eighty three years old and has returned to Britain and the Westminster Crescent neighborhood she grew up in after living more than 60 years in Australia. Her husband Len has passed away, and her young adult son David, so she is basically waiting for death to claim her, as it has for everyone in her family: “Helen Cartwright was old with her life broken in ways she could not have foreseen. Walking helped, and she tried to go out every day, even when it poured. But life for her was finished. She knew that and had accepted it. Each day was an impersonation of the one before with only a slight shuffle⁠—as though even for death there is a queue…Everyone she has ever loved or wanted to love is gone, and behind a veil of fear she wishes to be where they are.” Life, however, is not finished with Helen.

Early one morning, still dark outside, Helen spots a neighbor setting out his trash for pickup. Something compels her to cross the street and look more closely at what turns out to be an old aquarium and boxes of tank decor. She remembers a trip to the pet shop with David who wished for just such a gift, “Helen turns the item over. A plastic deep sea diver. Touches the air tank and flippers. Behind the diving mask two painted eyes seem to recognize her. She had bought the very same thing for her son’s thirteenth birthday. Then it had been part of a set.” She carries the discarded aquarium back to her home, and proceeds to clean it out. 

She is awakened late at night, “This isn’t a loud noise, but an insistent one. Something is happening downstairs in her house on Westminster Crescent that hasn’t happened before. A person breaking in? She knows there are burglaries in the town because it’s in the local paper. But what does she have to steal? This is a place where everything of value has already been taken.” This is an awakening in more ways than one. Is it serendipity, magic, divine intervention, or the universe realigning itself? We may never know. What we do know is life can turn on a dime (and give 9¢ change). The more we open ourselves to the moment in front of us, the grip of the past loosens, and wonderful things come into our lives. This is what happens to Helen, and reading the book allows us to go on the journey with her. I loved every minute of it. It is like watching an iris bloom opening by dropping its petals, one at a time, before your eyes as the sun hits it on a cool spring morning, and you feel privileged to have witnessed it.