Uma

Age 65 years · Rekindling lifelong reading habits.

I was a reader once. A serious one. In my twenties I kept a journal of every book I finished —the date, a line or two about how it made me feel. I filled three notebooks. Then life arrived in full: a husband, children, a household, a career stitched around all of that. The books didn’t disappear entirely, but they moved to the edges. A chapter here, a few pages there, always with one ear open for someone calling my name.

After Suresh passed, people told me to keep busy. Take walks. Call friends. Join a class. Good advice, all of it. But what I craved —and couldn’t quite explain —was stillness. Not the heavy stillness of grief, but something inhabited. Purposeful quiet.

My daughter found an old novel on my shelf, one I’d bought thirty years ago and never opened. She set it on my bedside table without saying anything. I think she understood.

I began reading it one afternoon in November, sitting in the chair by the window that used to be my husbands. The light was good. Within an hour I had forgotten, just briefly, to be sad. That felt like a small miracle.

What strikes me now, reading at sixty-five, is how differently I receive a story than I did at twenty-five. I am less impatient. I notice things I would have skipped before —the way a character holds something back, a description of an ordinary evening that suddenly carries the whole weight of a life. I think loss teaches you to read more slowly.

I have finished eleven books since November. I have started a new journal —not the same as the old ones, but mine. Last week my granddaughter asked me what I was writing in it. I told her I was keeping track of the places books had taken me.

She asked if she could come too, next time. I said yes. Always yes.