Best Before 09 by Sharon Gwada
Best Before 09 is a memoir that illuminates the life of Gwas, a little boy just getting started in life. As a student he has to balance life between school and hospital. His siblings know that the hospital will have him more than they will. His mama knows that if it were possible to give life to another, she would have gladly given up hers for his.
The hardest part about memoirs is you can’t be mad at the author for a conclusion that you wanted to end differently. Things that didn’t sit well with you. You can’t say I wish you didn’t let the nurse administer the thigh intramuscular injection when Gwas was only nine, or that I’d have been less pained if you would have kept Tonnie for longer days and if Gwas had to be ill, then dear author, you should have picked a lighter disease. Something that might have required a minor surgery. Then given him a happier boyhood. Let him live and maybe, just maybe, in his old age, let the end-stage renal disease have the fragments of the few days left in him.
While fiction writers have the privilege to omit a few pains in their next books, memoirs just are. They are what happened. To change the plot is to go back in time, and to go back in time, aside from being an impossibility, is to disregard the present.
Grief takes many forms, but at the very core of it, there are the extensive days and moments of complete disarray. If feels like, “we put so much effort into this, it should have ended differently”. The book made me wish I had met Gwas in person. The book made me cry on a Tuesday morning.
What stood out for me was how the author perfectly captured the struggles of living with a patient with a chronic illness and how sometimes even the strongest family members need just a day or two of ‘rest’. I loved that there was beauty and hope despite everything.
This is a book for everyone, more so for people struggling with the loss of loved ones.
About the Reviewer
Philly Opere is a writer who has co-authored the coastal story ‘Kas Kazi’ and had her works published in the Kalahari Review and African Magazine. When not looking for books to buy, she is writing stories in her blog https://vanishavivian.blogspot.com/.
