If you were given just one more day to spend with someone you love who had already left this world, what would you do?
When he was a kid, Charley Benetto was asked by his father to choose: “be a mama’s boy or a daddy’s boy, but not both.” So he chose his father. Charley went along with his father’s plans, following all his orders, including developing his baseball career to join a top-tier club.
The book is divided into several timelines: the present, the past where he “chose” his father and didn’t stand up for his mom, and another past where his father abandoned them.
In the present time, it’s years after his mother’s death, when his life has been shattered by alcohol and regret, divorce from his wife, and not being a good father to his children, Charley contemplates suicide. His car crashes into a truck and falls onto a large billboard. But he failed to die. Instead, he is transported back to his old home and finds someone he never stood up for: his mother.
Charley entered the kitchen and found his mother preparing food for him, just as she did when Charley was a child. It seemed as if nothing had changed after all the years had passed. His mother took him to work, visiting elderly people's homes to beautify them. It was said that since his father left when Charley was growing up, his mother raised him and his younger sibling alone, working in a beauty salon.
In the chapter about the past time when Charley “chose” his father and didn’t stand up for his mother, the author writes about ordinary moments but had meaningful lessons, showing how as a kid or even in our teenage years, we sometimes don’t realize that our behaviour might hurt our parents. Even when we already become an adult, we tend to forget our roots.
As for Charley, although he never knew the reasons behind his parents' divorce, as he grew older, he felt increasingly uncomfortable with the feminine figure of his mother and angry that she was the only woman he knew who was divorced.
But in that moment, when he has the chance to be with his mother for one more day, he sees and hears everything he hadn't known when his mom was still alive. How unfair it was for a woman to be judged for divorce, how difficult it was for his mom to make ends meet and sent him to a college, only to have him dropped out to pursue his baseball career when his father appeared out of nowhere after years of absence without excuses.
Charley realizes that he never knew his mother as Pauline or Posey (her name), he only knew her as “a mother”. He never saw her as an independent working woman, or a “divorced woman”; he only knew her as a mother who should be a role model, without even knowing how hard the struggle was.
And it wouldn't be Mitch Albom if he didn’t throw some plot twist in the last few pages, which makes us the readers feel more connected with the characters. I don’t want to spoil anything, so I hope you have a chance to read this book if this is your cup of tea.
Because it leaves me with some questions: what would we do if we were given the same chance to spend just one more day with someone we love who had already passed away? Do you think we would understand anything about that person better?