Title: When Life Gives You Pears
Author: Jeannie Gaffigan
Publication: October 6, 2020
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Genre: Non-Fiction
Pages: 321

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SYNOPSIS: (From Goodreads)

In 2017, Jeannie’s life came to a crashing halt when she was diagnosed with a life-threatening brain tumor. As the mother of 5 kids — 6 if you include her husband — sat in the neurosurgery department in star-covered sweats too whimsical for the seriousness of the situation, all she could think was “Am I going to die?”

Thankfully, Jeannie and her family were able to survive their time of crisis, and now she is sharing her deeply personal journey through this miraculous story: the challenging conversations she had with her children; how she came to terms with feeling powerless and ferociously crabby while bedridden and unable to eat for a month; and how she ultimately learned, re-learned and re re-learned to be more present in life.

With sincerity and hilarity, Jeannie invites you into her heart (and brain) during this trying time, emphasizing the importance of family, faith and humor as keys to her recovery and leading a more fulfilling life.

REVIEW:

I am entirely unsure as to where I picked this book up at.  However, I do know that I picked it up purely on the fact that it was written by Jim Gaffigan’s wife so I had a sneaking suspicion that it would probably be a good book.  I actually had this book in physical as well as audiobook form.  I had gotten off audiobooks while in school and still struggled to get back into them. I had listened when I drove transfers to Grand Rapids for my job but stopped since I was now “healing instead of wheeling” down to Grand Rapids.  However, Easter came upon us and I was taking a trip to visit my family and thought you know, let’s pick a shortish book to listen to on the way down and I settled upon this one.  I hoped it was a good one. 

Jeannie was a juggler.  She juggled everything, husband’s production company, writer for skits, she juggled 5 kids plus all of their activities, she juggled keeping up a house and everything that it entails.  That kind of came to a screeching halt when she offhandedly mentioned to her physician that she had lost most of her hearing in one ear and fair amount of time ago and was just too busy to get it looked at.  What precipitated after that was a cascade of tests and appointments that led the doctors to find a large pear shaped mass or rather tumor if you will in her brain that was pressing on her brain stem.  Cue the ah-ha moment of why she was breathless when she laid down, why she got dizzy when she stood up.  All of these symptoms explained themselves when she got the diagnosis.  Suddenly Jeannie had to give it all to God.  She had to release the hold she had on planning literally everything and put everything aside so she could deal with this tumor.  This book was amazing.  It is read by the author herself and her sister since the tumor removal messed with her vocal chords and all the reading would have tired them out.  The book was so good that even my three children enjoyed listening to it, which is a shocker to say the least.

This book really was all encompassing.  I saw some of myself in her.  While I don’t have a massive tumor I juggle everything without asking for help.  It made me realize that I need to let some things go.  It won’t be perfect but that is ok.  It’s ok to ask for help sometimes.  In fact that is a very human thing to do, ask for help.  It doesn’t make you weak at all, it makes you human.  The author talks about her faith and how it got her through some of the darkest days.  I was raised in a devout Catholic family, so I understand everything that she was talking about.  While I’m not practicing I still live by the things that were engrained in me from a young age.  The author talks about how comedy helped her through as well.  She needed the humor to lighten a dark time.  I think the biggest thing she touched on which is also massive for me is family.  Family is such a huge thing in your life.  Her family dropped everything to be at her side.  Her husband stopped touring, her mother moved into her house to help care for the kids and her when the time came.  Her other family moved a block away from where she lived to also help care for the kids.  They even had shared custody of two dogs with her brother.   Her family had a round the clock schedule with her in the ICU so she never woke up and was completely alone.  She called on nuns to pray for her and help her through a dark time.  It brings home the adage of you do for family.  While I wish my family was closer to me I am building my own family with my significant other and his kids.  We are building something from the ground up that I didn’t have in my previous relationship.  This book is powerful and eye opening. You will not regret reading it.  I may just pass it to my mother for her to read.