Sitting Practice, by Caroline Adderson

Ross and Iliana are an unlikely match, but they fall in love and marry.  He is gregarious, soft-bodied, a foodie who caters for the movie industry in Vancouver, BC.  She is quiet, athletic, a nurse who escaped her upbringing as child of a fundamentalist Christian minister.  Both love their work, and love each other. 

Six weeks into their marriage, a terrible car wreck changes their lives forever.  Iliana suffers a spine injury that leaves her wheelchair-bound with no hope of walking again.  It takes agonizing months of rehab just to be able to sit up in the chair without a body brace.  Sitting practice.  Ross still loves his wife, but is blown away by guilt, helplessness, and the accoutrements of the new Iliana—brace, chair, catheters—and his libido melts away. 

Sitting Practice follows their marriage and the people who are close to them.  It is the story of coping with a sudden, stunning, irrevocable change—not just Iliana’s coping, but Ross’s, and the ripples outward among the people who know them.  When Ross plunges into guilt and depression after the accident, an old girlfriend takes him to a Buddhist retreat.  He is a hopelessly clumsy participant but something stirs him, and he becomes an unlikely but earnest novice Buddhist, even occasionally experiencing a valuable insight into his own behavior.  Another sitting practice. 

I had this book for months before finally opening it, fearing that it would be more depressing than I could bear.  It was not depressing.  Nor was it sentimental, or treacly.  The characters pulled me in, page after page.  Even the most minor or annoying ones were developed enough, interesting enough to care about and remember.  The humor was tough.  I found the story to have an unexpected rhythm, which I liked for the way it reflected the unpredictable veering of any life.  No single thread dominates, yet each is important to the weave—Iliana and her slow, frustrating rehab, her sudden invisibility, and loss of herself as a sexual being; Ross and his panic and guilt, his cautious reaching for a system that can contain and give meaning to his life; the satellite characters (Ross’s narcissistic twin sister, Bonnie, and her toddler son—his beloved nephew, Bryce—and many others).  Each bumbles along; the story turns unexpected corners.  I kept second-guessing but didn’t quite anticipate the twists on the way to the ending, which is another threshold moment, not sweet but full of light. 

~ Paula