Staying Alive: A Love Story

Book excerpt: Staying Alive: A Love Story is a story of hope and renewal that centers on a woman’s search for meaning after the untimely death of her 49-year-old husband. Coupled with other experiences of loss in her life she is determined to, with her children, persevere.Like Annie Dillard, Hayden draws on the rhythms and rituals of the natural world to explore her Brooklyn roots and New England adulthood. Wild creatures and domesticated critters, seasides and hillsides proffer comfort and understanding as she comes to realize that “no more than a hairline and no less than an eternity” separate her from the man she loved. Even with the wear and tear her faith endures, it rarely diminishes.Her purpose – to usher her two grieving children through a difficult adolescence to a well-adjusted adulthood – resonates through her own struggles. With the precise objectivity reminiscent of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and Joyce Carol Oates’ A Widow’s Story, Hayden recounts the day her husband died and the rituals and obsessions of the bereaved. Forced to look at death straight in the eye, the author stares back, wide-eyed, without blinking through her tears.Hayden also manages to be seriously droll – in an Anne Lamott way. Never is her humor more honed than in the portrayal of her deceased spouse, whose devotion, antics, and wisdom remain ever-present to those who are staying alive without him. His death becomes not only the family’s heartbreak, but the loss of a well-executed life for all who knew him or will get to know him through these essays.Whether Laura Hayden’s writing deals with herself, her children, or her cadre of loved ones, it is clear that she, her daughter, and her son emerge from their tragic loss survivors, not victims of Larry’s death, an outcome of which he would be very pleased. In a culture of intentionally exposed and celebrated self-victimization, the story of this family may be considered a quiet triumph.