This is one of the first books I read in my childhood that made me sob, as in, a “set down the book and weep” full-bodied experience.
As a young woman, I was on a quest to find this book again, having forgotten the title and author, but not the power of emotion it stirred in me. I was working at the Kellogg-Hubbard Library in the heart of Montpelier, Vermont at the time, and searched for it for months. When I found it at last, there was no mistaking it.
What an extraordinary experience to reread it. I had remembered so little of the plot and reveled in discovering its setting and characters. So many details seemed entirely new to me, how could I have missed this and that, I wondered with awe. But without fail, Brother Rush still took my breathe away; Tree’s complicated grief still touched up against mine.
Years later still, when foraging through a long ago packaged box of mementoes from my childhood, I found my copy. The paperback has a different cover than this one, and again, I could hardly believe that I was holding it in my hands, instantly transported 30 years ago to my childhood bedroom, the yellow ruffles of my curtains filtering in the afternoon light while I read — and wept — with abandon.
I rediscovered that this book had been gifted to me, with an inscribed bookplate on the inside cover. To me from my beautiful young aunt and godmother, Melanie. Written by her hand, maybe one or two years before her young life was hijacked by an ALS diagnosis, maybe three or four years before her devastatingly sad death.
Many, many years later, my small tightly knit community suffered a devastatingly sad tragedy and five beautiful teenagers were buried. The mother of one of the children who died reached out to me in desperation over her younger daughter, who was unreachable and withdrawn in the aftermath of this loss. Both daughters had been favorite students of mine; both daughters voracious readers, but most especially, the younger.
The only thing I could do, the only way to even begin to help shepherd a young girl through the agony of her grief, was to begin with a book. I found my copy of Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush — every bit as treasured as silver, as gold, if not more so — and added a new inscription on the inside.
To a new reader who needed solace.
To a young woman in the depths of despair.
May this book give you comfort as it has given me.
May you never feel alone, for you are a reader.
For you are connected to a hidden vibration, deep inside this universe where all beings exist within.
Connected to my godmother by a thread, after all these years, what I have of her is so very little, and so very precious. But in this act, the love lives on — and the light. It’s the only way through this hard and complicated thing called life: give often, give openly, give with abandon. The antidote to the dark is always, always sweet light.
Give it all away, for what remains is the power of a deep love flowing — and the power of story. And if we are lucky, there’ll be gentle ghosts to help ferry us to other dimensions, to other times, and perchance we might sit with our beloveds on some other plane, in some celestial dimension, on some distant shore in the by and by.
