Healing from grief is a thousand kinds of awful, awkward, strange and desperately, disorientingly uncertain.
In a landscape where many of the old certainties of life are gone, and a chaotic jumble of previously unknown feelings and experiences have taken their place, it’s entirely fair to say that there is not a great deal to laugh about.
Almost nothing, in fact, and yet with writing that is both hilariously and poignantly affecting, Steven Rowley (Lily and the Octopus) finds a way in The Guncle, a novel possessed of a whimsically light title and cover that nevertheless dives deep into the murky depths of grief where up and down are upside down and finding your way out becomes an exercise in navigating the mother of all confounding mazes.
In this delightfully moving novel – that the two, hilarity and sadness manage to coexist so wonderfully well in The Guncle is ringing endorsement enough of Rowley’s sublimely touching skill as a writer – a once-famous sitcom star by the name of Patrick O’Hara, who has fled to the relative anonymity and remoteness of Palm Springs from his previous home in L.A. to deal, or not deal really, with the grief of losing his boyfriend Joe to a horrible accident, finds himself unceremoniously reacquainted with life’s messy contours when he has to assume temporary guardianship of his niece Maisie and nephew Grant.
It’s a million miles from what he was expecting his life to be, and while he loves Maisie and Grant, he loves in what the back cover blurb almost gleefully refers to as “small does” where the parents remain to take care of all the tantrums, uncomfortable questions and child admin that comes with having kids around 24/7.
“He crouched and out his right arm around Grant and held the phone out in front of him. ‘Squeeze in!’ They were cheek-to-cheek, and for a moment Patrick’s heart skipped–for a fraction of a second it actually feel like it stopped beating– and he took in a sharp breath of air. It was so, he didn’t know–saccharine. And yet deeply genuine, profound; he felt something he hadn’t in a long, long time. He closed his eyes.
I love you, he said silently in his head, to himself, to the kids, to Joe, to Sara, to no one. To everyone.” (P. 126)
While he agrees to their presence in his life reluctantly, if only because he feels an obligation to his brother, and to stand in opposition to his semi-estranged sister who has quite firm ideas of her own about how they should be raised over one hot Palm Springs summer, he soon finds himself warming to the idea of having Maisie and Grant around.
For a start, while none of them want to address the subject directly, Patrick because he’s in rampant denial and the kids because well, they’re kids, they are both mired in the unholy hell that is grief.
The kids seize the chance to leave their family home and all the memories it, and their surrounding Connecticut community contains, to spend 12 weeks with GUP, or Gay Uncle Patrick, who immerses them in a carefree world of fairy floss breakfasts, endless pool swimming and Christmas in whatever the hell month it happens to be.
In amongst all the diversionary fun and frivolity, there are moments of real emotion, times when the sheer weight of grief comes bearing down on them and Maisie and Grant need their GUP, who’s still coming to terms with grief himself, and he, often surprisingly himself steps up to the plate.
To be fair, Patrick, who’s best throuple friends over the fence known collectively as JED and his housekeeper Rosa are mainstays of his life and are there for him when he needs them, isn’t always entirely sure what stepping up to the metaphorical plate, replete as it is with near-foreign sporting references, looks like but he knows he has to do it if Maisie and Grant are going to emerge from the initial stages of losing someone extraordinarily near and dear with anything approaching themselves and their childhood intact.
Full of Auntie Mame moments, which don’t happen nearly as much as his suspicious Clara thinks they do, The Guncle is a sobering joy to read precisely because it honours in ways that feel like a relief to anyone who has experienced the soul-shattering, life-disorienting hellishness of grief, what it is like to lose someone.
The old feel and look of your life landscape is gone, and in the immediate aftermath of loss, it’s all too easy to wonder how on earth you’re going to get it back; and when you suddenly realise with horrific alarm, that it isn’t coming back, you wonder how on earth you can fashion a new life, especially with that one special irreplaceable person missing and sadly never to return.
The Guncle gets all this and then some, offering a salient lesson on the messy, upside down strangeness and discomfort of grief, assuring you, and Patrick, Maisie and Grant who need to hear this the most, that what they’re experiencing is normal – awful beyond belief but normal.
“Patrick folded the napkin and slipped it into his pocket. You’re very good with them. It was all he could do not to cry. He looked over his shoulder to thank the couple, but they were already passing the windows outside. He watched, hoping to catch their attention, until there were out of sight. Alas, they never turned back.
… Sometimes things come back to life.” (P. 260)
Thankfully, though, what The Guncle also does, and in ways that will make your heart sing with the sheer restorative hope of it all, is reacquaint you with the way in which life can bloom again.
Patrick has spent four near-Greta Garbo-esque years deciding it cannot, pushing away people like possible new love Emory, who’s fun but grounded in a way that enchants but also unsettles Patrick, neglecting his career, and doing as little as possible that might smack of engaging with life.
But when nine-year-old Maisie and six-year-old Grant come along, all open emotional wounds with no words to describe them and desperate to find someway to make sense of the inexplicable, Patrick has to deal with their pain and his in a way that remakes life not even remotely as it was – there’s too much pain and loss for that to happen – but as it could be.
The lesson learned throughout is that being vulnerable, truly opening yourself to life’s unpredictable twists and turns, with the capacity for hurt and happiness in sometimes equal measure that entails, is the only way to begin to live with grief.
You never really emerge from it nor are you ever fully healed but The Guncle, full of snappy oneliners, witty comebacks and Guncle rules to live by that are as sage as they are winningly funny, makes the case, with humour, wisdom and reassuringly insightful empathy, and charm in bountifully uplifting quantity, that it is possible to live again, to find a reason to go on and that when you do so, with the help of those around you, life might just surprise you in ways that will living once again seem like something truly worth doing.