A Part Review of A Pilot’s Wife

Now that my daughter is over a year old, she has finally gotten slightly more independent. This is mum speak for having enough privacy and freedom to visit the loo unaccompanied! Also, she sleeps undisturbed for hours and that allows me to bask in doing things just for me, like reading. I read with passion, like a thirsty traveller guzzling up cold, fresh water. This is the only way I can properly spend my me time. If I do end up using these precious hours for something else, I am left frustrated and annoyed. I didn’t relax, my head cries, I should have read.
So why is it that I am spending these invaluable hours writing this post? It is because when I began to read this novel, A pilot’s wife, it touched me so deeply I just had to share my opinion and insight. I am still on the first chapter, but I am quite sure I wouldn’t remember half of it after I finish. So here is my first post on it, and let me warn you, this is more a dip into my thoughts and experiences rather than a review of this book. The author’s sharp observational skills have deeply mirrored my own views and so I take her book as a journey into my own thoughts.

Chapter One

1. “Upstairs in the hallway, she was momentarily confused. It was too long a hallway, with too many doors and too many rooms. Already the memories of the day had begun to taint the rooms, to overlay previous memories”

Kathryn, the protagonist, has just received the shocking news of her husband’s death. A pilot by profession, he has died in a plane explosion. She begins to see the rooms with new eyes, and these painful memories would always be connected with them. I really understand it. Even if your house is full of your happy childhood memories, if something tragic happens, you will always link back that place to that incident and the happy memories would only pop back into your mind ocassionally.

2. “No matter how often Kathryn observed the phenomenon, she found it hard to comprehend: the way nothing could remain as it had been, not a house that was falling down, not a woman’s face that had once been beautiful, not childhood, not a marriage, not love.”

Everything in this life has an invisible time limit stamped on it, and we humans get so caught up in the present (or for some, past) we forget that nothing is permanent. Just a year ago, my daughter was tiny and all she could do was cry and sleep. But in a year, how many things change. We don’t notice how hours add up into days, then weeks, months and years pass by. Everything in this life was built to crumble. How much of importance we place on beauty, buying pots and pots of expensive cream, and expecting our spouses to be the epitome of physical beauty? How much of money is put into constructing houses fit to be called palaces, with state of the art furniture? How carefree and happy we feel as children, thinking this will never end? It is the greatest deceit Shaythan has pulled on us humans. He has fooled us into thinking everything here is permanent.

3. “That’s what saved me, Kathryn. Saving you saved me. Having to take care of you. I had to stop asking why Bobby had died. I just had to stop asking.”

Julia, her grandmother, explains her mental state when was faced to bring up Kathryn alone when her son and daughter-in-law died in a crash. Almost everyone would believe that if I had divorced before having a child, it would have been easier on me, but I strongly oppose this. Having a tiny human being entirely dependent on me was what pulled me through and didn’t allow me to sink into the lowest depths of depression. I had to look after you, and by doing that, you looked after me. You saved me, my precious angel.