Lucy By the Sea

By Elizabeth Strout

And when I found out I had been living a parallel life, a dishonest life, it crushed me. But I have often thought that it made me a nicer person, I really do. When you are truly humbled, that can happen. I have come to notice this in life. You can become bigger or bitter, this is what I think. And as a result of that pain, I became bigger.

Yes, this is a story about grief. But it is not just about grieving the loss of a loved one. It is about grieving a host of large and small losses, the very rhythms of life. In this book Elizabeth Strout takes us to one couple’s experience of the pandemic in a small coastal town in Maine where they have escaped their home in New York.

Too soon? I pondered as I read the blurb on the inside cover. Maybe…

But I brought it home anyway. And as I was reading I found myself lying in bed one night trying to remember my experience of 2020. It’s a way that I handle grief, I noticed after Roy died. Counting down the years of my life and assembling a linear sort of memory bank of experiences. With the pandemic, I tried counting down the months. But I could not place events in any orderly, linear timeframe. I could only construct isolated memories: a drive-by birthday party for my mom, working on a book with my writing partner, reviewing edits over the phone, a collective Easter celebration on TV watching Andre Bocelli perform and sweeping views of empty streets in Italy.

Did that really happen? I pondered to myself, though I know that it did. And what, in fact, happened in my own life? Coming on the heels of grieving Roy, I believe now that it was simply an extension of the unreality I had already been experiencing as my brain continued to put new pieces of my life in place.

Strout’s story of the pandemic illustrates not just the external circumstances of the event, but also the internal struggles I believe we shared as a global community. She takes us into the psyche of two pretty normal seniors who are invited by the pandemic to ponder their own mortality, along with concerns about their adult children. We watch them forge new, unexpected relationships in social distanced outdoor spaces. We watch them live through four seasons in a climate and community very different from the one they called normal. And we watched how two people who had grown apart, came back together in a humbler, kinder, more authentic and honest way.

The protagonist Lucy, who is also the storyteller, gives us a glimpse of her insomniac mental wanderings:

I stayed awake and I thought: We all live with people—and places—and things—that we have given great weight to. But we are weightless, in the end.