Review: When Life Gives You Pears

I should have staged this picture of me reading When Life Gives You Pears: The Healing Power of Family, Faith, and Funny People with St. Peter’s Basilica in the background or the amazing blue water of the Aegean Sea as we cruised through the Greek Islands. Instead, you get a real moment of downtime when I was in fact reading Jeannie Gaffigan’s harrowing and inspiring memoir about her medical and spiritual journey after discovering a pear-sized tumor in her brain stem.

Who takes this book on a mediterranean vacation? It’s not exactly lite reading for a cruise. And yet, it was just the right thing to bring along. First of all, I was looking forward to reading it, and that’s good enough for any time. I’m a fan of her work, and last year when Catholic Twitter blew up with the news of her tumor, I added my prayers to the mix.

What a blessing to be able to read about the happy ending of those prayers. Jeannie not only survived the surgery and the subsequent life-threatening illness that followed, but her family survived the experience with grace.

More than anything, it seems to me the story Jeannie tells is a story about grace. How circumstances and situations lined up just right to set into motion events and people who would save her life, and along the way, I think, strengthen her family in ways that faith often does. Sure, we get the details about that pear squeezing her brains, but we also get a vulnerable and intimate look into what happens when we give our suffering and fears to the Lord and trust in him.

Jeannie’s story is inspiring. It’s laugh out loud funny at times. But make no mistake, it’s a profound lesson in taking the lemons pears that life throws at us, and turn them into something beautiful. It was just the right thing to bring with me on my pilgrimage — and an opportunity to round out those first prayers for the Gaffigans by once again bringing them up in prayer, this time of thanksgiving, at some of the holy sites we visited.