Is this comedy? The opening chapters,describing that night are breathless with the shock,disbelief and of her incompetence. For her,it was a cosmic slap in the face that would shape her life.
She calls her father,then an ambulance and the world of trauma,of grief begins.
“I lay down beside him on the floor,closed my eyes. I was conscious of the sound of him not breathing. I held his hand. His body was hard and cold. My body became hard and cold. The feeling leached from me. It disappeared from my fingertips. ‘He’s not here,’ I wanted to say again. I disappeared into the carpet like liquid. A stain. My senses diluted. I waited. For a sign. A feeling. For a message. For anything. His absence had a physical weight to it. It filled up the room.”
Sholl is writing this 16 years later. Bits ofFound,Wanting began as part of a creative-writing class,but it painstakingly forged itself into a book. Twenty-two is so young,too young to have been dealt that slap when you are just testing maturity. And although Sholl trod carefully around Rob’s family,his parents and his two sisters,it seems clear that because she and Rob were not married she was unable to express the full extent of her loss.
She cannot remember what the weather was like the day of the funeral but she can remember the eulogy,acknowledging their love but also remembering getting angry that it wasn’t quite right. This wasn’t describing the Rob she knew. Lover,partner,friend is different from child,brother.