I Love Renee, Too

Friends,

I understand why Rob Sheffield loved his wife. Love is a Mixtape is the best evidence of why his wife was supremely awesome. I fell in love with her. Indie rock fan. Makes her own clothes. Kind of fun like the girl in "Punk Rock Girl" by the Dead Milkmen. And, the kicker, loves baseball. Renne was like Dr. Frankenstein took the best parts of Catherine, Danielle, and Tom and stitched together a beautiful woman that burned bright for not nearly long enough. What's not to like? I love Renee too. She sounds like the perfect woman. For God's sake, she loved Joey Cora. Joey Cora! Nobody loves Joey Cora, not even his mom. Takes a special kind of baseball fan to be devoted to that guy...kind of like my love for Tom Lawless (mostly for that bat flip in 1987).

Now, I will admit, some of the essays (or is this a memoir with chapters...I'm not sure) I got a little bored with. Why? Partly because I have a robot heart that runs off sadness and pain of others (thank you, workshops!) and many of the essays followed this format of something cutesy and fun, but toward the end there's this little reminding punch that Renee is dead. It felt like three or four in a row had that exact construction of light, fun, nice...then, BOOM, "you know my wife is dead, right?" and then it's like "Aww, man...shit. Why you gotta say that? I was digging this thing about going to a Pavement concert." So I was lulled to sleep when suddenly he writes the essay about how she died. That floored me. It was really well done, and told so starkly you could really feel it. And I realized that everything before that was to set up that essay so well. I read that essay the night before I went to Madison and I was supposed to go to bed early but I couldn't because I read that essay...so I had to read the next three or four before heading to bed. But I couldn't get it out of my head.

It scared the shit out of me. Spoiler alert, but Renee dies suddenly from a pulmonary embolism...on Mother's Day. She was just walking to the other room when she died suddenly.

I don't deal with death very well. It's something I'm really scared of, as in keeps me up at night. And reading about it like that creeped me out for obvious reasons. Then, as Sheffield talked about making funeral arrangements, it hit me about all the arrangements I'll need to make for my parents one day...and how as an only child, it is all my responsibility to set that all up.

And, the more I think about how he handled the death of his wife, and the process of grieving and recovery, I kind of liked that. I wish I understood why he started to give things away from his wife. I know he had to move on, but I don't remember being told how he thought giving away the stuff would help him. And how he made the transition between grief and giving away the stuff didn't seem clear to me.

Now, Diana told me that if a woman had written this essay, then it would be dismissed as chick lit. And, you know, I don't know shit about chick lit. Maybe this would be, I don't know, but I know I enjoyed the book viscerally. It may not have tripped my MFA Writing (capital W intended) trigger, but I still liked it. If all chick lit is like this, then maybe chick lit isn't all that bad. I figured chick lit was more about light romance or shopping or sex and the city kind of stuff about shoes and purses with strange Italian names. But, if chicks are writing a lot of stuff like this...then godspeed, chicks. Keep on keeping on.

viva el mustache