The Winter Vault

By Anne Michaels

“Regret is not the end of the story; it is the middle of the story.”

Suffering takes us to new places. And sometimes to new people. And always, if we let it, to new openings of the heart. Author Anne Michaels is teaching me how to make narrative poetic. I remember being captivated by her first novel Fugitive Pieces and found in this one (her second) the same comforting poetic exploration which always helps me look suffering in the eye. Michaels takes on subjects many of us might label as “too heavy” or “too painful.” But she magically weaves love through it in a way which allows me to not only bear the suffering, but also find a way through. There are, in her words, so many references to the way love works in the heart, in relationships and in the world, one has to pay keen attention to grasp them in the beauty of her prose. She says, and I believe it is the theme of the book, “Grief is desire in its purest distillation.”

Michaels tells a story of young love and early loss, interwoven with the devastating aftermath of war. She takes us from a riverboat on the Nile to a neighborhood in Toronto, to reflections of post-war Warsaw. Her use of detail paints vivid scenes, from the engineering relocation of a soaring Abu Simbel monument to the reclaiming and rebuilding of Warsaw neighborhoods. She invites us into landscapes of the botany of riverbeds, the harsh cruelty of desert sands, and the rubble of cement, dust and detritus post bombing. She offers a bit of history, of the St. Lawrence seaway and segments of the Nile.

And she showed me how the suffering of a single person, or a young couple, which could easily disappear into history without mention, echos and somehow reverberates with the larger suffering of humanity. She shows how the way each person decides to respond to suffering is connected to humanity’s negotiation with this reality of life on the largest scales. How the loss experienced by one young couple is connected to the loss experienced by millions in the aftermath of war. How two people simply sharing their experience of loss, in the most simple and mundane details of life brings healing not only to those two, but also to those who find themselves living in their wake as the healing ripples outward toward them.

Each person’s journey toward healing is the healing of all around them, and brings healing to the entire universe.

“If there is true forgiveness possible in this world, thought Jean, it is not conferred out of mercy; nor is it conferred by one person to another, but to both by a third - a compassion between them. This compassion is the forgiveness.”

And I would dare to add, from this compassion, and forgiveness, come the healing.