INERTIA by Kim Cope Tait

 We still don't really like to talk about grief - our own - seeing it as a burden we put on those close to us, and often unable to explain or rationalise what is going on or how we may be feeling. Because we are uncomfortable in ourselves, we aren't that great at helping or listening to those around us with their grieving. And oh my goodness, grief is such a complicated beast, such an overwhelming and at times unbearable thing, stage of life we have to go through. As a funeral celebrant I have dealt with many situations of grief, read many books and personal accounts of what losing someone close and dear to you is like. And believe me, no one person's experience of it is like any other person's. It is quite an understatement and a cliche to say this is a personal experience, but it really is. Your grieving - the physical, emotional and mental manifestations of it is so different from anyone else's and needs to be relished, to be travelled through for it to have a meaning and a resolution of sorts. 

Which is what this novel is all about. A shocking boating accident takes the lives of three young teenage girls, the boat being driven by fellow teen Angela, and also on the boat is Jake, boyfriend of one of the girls. Young death is so much more shocking than elderly death. Those beautiful vibrant and promising lives stopped. Jake and Angela, never really friends while young, through this tragedy, forge a strange friendship, forced only because of the deaths, but also linked and united because of the deaths - they need each other. Angela has guilt on her side as the driver of boat even though she is completely blameless - a very common symptom of grief. Jake is devastated, completely bereft as he loses the only girl he knows he will ever love. Plus she will always only ever be that beautiful young thing, immortalised forever as that. And yet, through infrequent, random and awkward communications over the years, Jake and Angela  develop a very different type of closeness. 

Some years later, Jake is a teacher in a high school in Hawaii. A very good and popular teacher. In a strange turn of events Angela has managed to finally pay him a visit. And during this time, Jake realises that a second tragedy is looming, with close ties and similarities to what occurred when he was young. He does everything to avert the imminent events, and in the process comes to terms, finally, with the boating tragedy that changed his and Angela's lives so much. 

This is exquisitely written - the writer is also a poet. and she gives Jake the job of being an English teacher, allowing him to share with his students his own love of language and literature. I expect she too has gone through some serious grieving, so in tune with the depths of how grief and loss can affect oneself. There is a deep spiritual presence through out the story, but not a religious doctrine nature - more the spirituality we find within ourselves as we try to make sense of what has happened. Jake's move to Hawaii, for example, is part of this, his connection with the landscape, the environment aiding his healing. Other reviews of this book talk of angels, but I didn't really feel this, and to be honest did find the pivotal events in the last quarter of the story a little too fanciful for my own ever rational and pragmatic brain. However they do make sense, are not out of place in the context of the story or the character of Jake, and I concede it does work.  Best of all Jake's inertia is lifted, and he manages to find a way forward, life is for living, and part of that living is that we take our grief with us, it becomes a part of who we are and how we are.