Do you want to know the length of your life?
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It was in the spring of the year, March actually, that life got turned upside down in the United States with the arrival of the Pandemic and the need to quarantine. So when this book opens in March of some year with life getting turned upside down world-wide with the arrival of little boxes to people age twenty-one and older, I was put immediately back into that nervous mindset of 2020.
“The boxes appeared on finely mowed lawns in the suburb…They sat atop well-trampled doormats in the cities…They sank into the warm sands outside tents in the desert and waited near lonely lakeside cabins, gathering dew in the breeze off the water.” Each box carried the name of the recipient and the same inscription, “The measure of your life lies within.” Inside each box was one piece of string. Some were long, some short, and there was every length in between. Each string signified the length of that person’s life.
Keeping me in the Pandemic mindset, the author closes her first chapter by telling us, “When the boxes first arrived that March, amid the fear and the confusion, nobody quite understood what the measure truly meant. At least, not yet.”
The book then offers short chapters in which we learn about one character at a time. Thus we meet Nina with a long string. Her partner is Maura, and Maura’s string is half the size. Then there is Amie, who is Nina’s sister and who has decided not to open her box. Next comes Ben, an architect, who chose not to open his box. But his girlfriend opened it anyway, and left him over the length of his string. The lives and string lengths of military academy roommates Jack and Javier come next. And then there is Jack’s uncle, Anthony, a politician running for the presidency who uses string length divisively as he sows fear of the short-stringers.
“Two back-to-back shootings perpetrated by short-stringers set off a media frenzy. Should we fear more attacks by short-stringers? [they] asked.” Armed with such press, Anthony is instrumental in creating the STAR Initiative requiring string disclosures for the military and for high ranking government posts.
Scientists played a part in the book as they became better and better able to calculate the exact length of life for each string. And in some countries that were not democracies, citizens were forced to open their boxes and report on their string length. It all smacked of the pandemic for me.
With this mindset, I hoped there would be a cure found in this book, just like I had hoped for a cure with Covid-19. But of course, that hope is silly. Into everyone’s life death will fall. That reality is the core of the book, as is the question, would you live life differently if you knew the length of your days?
In this book we see what the long-stringers and short-stringers decide and are reminded to plan life like we will live forever and savor everyday as if it is our last.
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