Teaser Tuesdays -- Left Neglected by Lisa Genova

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by MizB @ Should Be Reading. To participate, all you have to do is the following:

• Grab your current/upcoming read
• Open to a random page
• Share 2-3 "teaser" sentences from somewhere on that page
• Be careful not to include spoilers!

We both laugh.I like the sound of my mother's laugh.  I wish she'd found those pills when I was a kid, that I wasn't learning the sound at the age of thirty-seven and at the price of a traumatic brain injury.

~page 231, Left Neglected by Lisa Genova

So.  I adored Still Alice, Lisa Genova's first (and bestselling) novel.  Adored it.  This one, I struggled with -- largely, I think, due to my total disconnect from Sarah, the main character.  I'm not competitive or Type A and I think lying to your kids is not cool -- for starters.  But I'm fascinated by the idea of left neglect, a neurological syndrome that sometimes happens after a traumatic brain injury.  After Sarah's car accident, she loses all awareness of the left side -- of her body, of her plate, of a page in a book.  Also, I appreciated the changes that came about in Sarah's relationship with her mother, as well as with the world at large.  (And I'm glad that she decided using a cell phone while driving is a bad idea -- I wasn't sure that was going to come.)  In fact, the end of the book has enough positive messages that I need to hear right now -- that one can make a new life and be happy, that hope and contentment exist, that opportunities arise, that it probably erases my issues at the beginning.  Sarah's character is redeemed, for me, by the "new" Sarah she becomes. 

As a side note, she celebrates the anniversary of surviving her car crash just like I do with my accident.  I love it.  And it makes me wonder -- perhaps there are more good things to come as a result of my accident, things that I'm not yet aware of.

Life choices vs. moral choices

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Since reading Moonlight Mile by Dennis Lehane, I have continued to ponder what the main character said at one point:

I just notice people sometimes mistake their life choices for their moral ones.
~p.133, Moonlight Mile by Dennis Lehane 

His words keep bouncing around in my head but I haven't been sure how to articulate my thoughts about why this sentence struck me in such a significant way.

I think that maybe I'm not the only one who (whether occasionally, sometimes, or often) struggles to make that distinction - where *is* the dividing line between something that is a moral issue and something that is simply a choice an individual has made about one part of her life?

Part of the difficulty, perhaps,arises when one thinks carefully about the decisions one makes. Most people have areas of their life within which they make more deliberate decisions.  I believe that it is those very decisions, the ones you take more time with, the ones that, perhaps, differ from those around you, that are the hardest to feel flexible about. 

Should our end goal be to acknowledge that even if we've carefully made life choices that are based on ethical or moral reasoning doesn't mean that someone who takes a different path is wrong?