For You Departed

Alan Paton's For You Departed is probably my favorite book in the whole world (here's where I've mentioned it before).

It Paton's tribute to his wife after she died, and his attempt to cope with his grief, in the tradition of C.S. Lewis's A Grief Observed. What I love about this book is how absolutely honest it is (something that is, understandably, rarely present after someone dies). Paton spells out the good and bad parts of his wife--she was a character, it seems--a really strong personality, proud and moody (he also writes about the good and bad parts of himself and the trials of their relationship). Through all of Paton's telling of their marriage, however, a strong love is present--but not a love of a woman he built up and idealized in his head; rather, the love of a women with all of her faults and idiosyncrasies, the love and admiration and respect for a real women.

The theme that resonates throughout the book is "To love and to be loved, they make up for it all" (not too different from my mother's theory of child raising, "Love covers a multitude of sins"). In the process of his telling about his wife, Paton's work--political, literary, and as the principle of a reformatory--is constantly recounted, showing the way in which she participated in his work.