Sealy executive's book explores life, death, hope
David Perry, Executive Editor -- Furniture Today, August 13, 2007
If you've come to this space looking for insights on the latest bedding trends, you're out of luck this week. But if you want to learn something about how to live life more fully, how to appreciate what really matters, you've come to the right place.
Our life lessons come from John O'Shaughnessy's first book, "The Greatest Gift: A Return to Hope."
It is the story of the life he fashioned with his wife, Ann, the family they were raising together, and how all that came crashing down when his wife was diagnosed with lung cancer, a disease that claimed her life and left her family devastated.
O'Shaughnessy works for Sealy, which is how his book came to my attention. I spent several hours with it the other night, pulled in by his skillfully woven, sometimes painful narrative. Ann speaks several times, in conversations with her husband and in final letters to him and to their two children.
To read those letters is to be allowed inside the family and to share its innermost feelings. The experience is emotionally wrenching. I shed a tear as I read the book. Have you ever thought of what you would write to your children if you knew your time here was short?
As a writer, I appreciate O'Shaughnessy's ability to talk candidly about his experiences and feelings. He writes about playing strip poker and making love with Ann on their honeymoon in Bermuda, and he writes about the changing seasons and Ann's changing fortunes: "The summer finally faded. Ann continued her weekly rides to the hospital where the poisons (chemotherapy) awaited her. Fall had been our favorite season; it was the season we met. It was then that we had more innocence and joy."
The seasons ebb and flow in the book, echoing the seasons of change in all our lives. He ends the book in winter, when "snowflakes no bigger than dandruff blow in the cold wind" outside the window of his dining room, where his wife died at age 42. It is there that he came to a profound conclusion: "In learning how to die, we learn how to live."
O'Shaughnessy admits that he was focused on the wrong things in life: getting more and better stuff. But that only weighs you down, "while the love that surrounds you lifts you to new heights," he writes.
And that is a great lesson for each of us. "The Greatest Gift" is available from Amazon.com, or from the publisher, Nelson Publishing and Marketing, at nelsonpublishingandmarketing.com.
Contact David Perry at dperry@reedbusiness.com
