REVIEW: Turtle Soup is Enough—Essays On Grief and Loss

Margaret O’Connor. Turtle Soup Is Enough: Laughing and Biking When Everything Falls Apart. Sonorous Flame Publishing (February 25, 2024). 157pp.

This book is a series of essays written for a college writing class by the author, Margaret O’Connor. It also happened to be the worst year of her life: her brother became wheelchair-bound after a terrible vehicle accident. Her genuine faith in God was tested, and this is the record of her struggles, thoughts, events, flashbacks, and discoveries. It is a raw and well-written commentary on suffering.

Did you know that the fluid in your spinal cord is the same color as lemonade? I sat and watched it drip from my little brother’s limp body into a medical bag on his bedside, as one of his surgeons told us the news that nearly shredded my faith to chaff.

“This kid will never walk again.”

These essays were written during the worst year of my life. I wrote them for one of my college classes, answering various prompts on the theme of place. I didn’t know at the time that I was chronicling a fight for my existence.

My family and faith have never been about fitting in. We don’t believe in God because of what they say at church. We see him in the mud that cakes our jeans and the laughter we share around the campfire, drinking beer and listening to the grisly stories our dad brings home from the ER. Our faith in God has never been about propriety; it’s been about relationship.

How can you reconcile that kind of faith when it seems like God stands by as your whole world falls apart?

When my faith went up in flames, I found truth like I never had before. Sometimes God shatters you to shatter the lies you didn’t know you believed, and there’s nothing left to do but buck up and face what’s right.

Faith is tested, hope victorious, and valuable lessons are learned along the way in this raw, wildly funny memoir.

The book is a short collection of well-written, short essays on various topics: growing up in her strange family (according to her), suffering of a loved one, loss of relationship, growing up as an intelligent introvert, friendship and awkward romance, an inappropriate swim coach, and struggling with faith as lived out in the real world.

O’Connor is now a middle school English teacher, beginning after her graduation with a Master of Arts in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Denver. Her skill is evident: the prose is engaging, informal, and deeply personal. She pulls no punches with how she feels about people, grief, God, males, and more—at the same time she has a strong desire to do the right thing and be a quality person.

The theme of the essays is that God works in difficult circumstances of suffering and trauma. Faith (mirroring the name given to Jacob in Genesis) is “struggling with God.” This is a favorite religious theme of mine, as well, for faith that doesn’t struggle is either young or shallow.

Written with insight, humor, and unfiltered emotion, even those without faith can find it helpful—for it is the story of the human condition, written with brutal clarity. From the introduction:

When your life shatters like fine china on a hardwood floor, and a hand clenches your heart so tight it threatens to dissolve your chest back into dust, it’s easy to believe lies. Maybe God doesn’t really love you. His promises might be true for others but can’t be true for you. Maybe you’re not enough for him. Your soul can become swamped in the muck of this life, thorns cutting red around your throat so you can hardly breathe.

The chapter titles are insightful and often provocative:

Reflections on Places, Grief, and Loss
On Sacred Things and Places
On Animals and Living with Nut Jobs
On Topography and Weather
Literature of Place Final Project
Breaking Silence and Finding Places
Finding Truth in Terrible Things
Being Friends with People You Fear

She appreciates her friends, and is honest with her own feelings. Here is a story about her good friend, Laura, who was by her side through all the trauma.

It was Laura who told me that she had loved me when we were in high school, she had loved me before the car accident, and she loved me now even though I was too sad to be funny and nice and smart. I cried into my dinner and told her I knew. I knew she loved New Margaret just like she loved Old Margaret. But I hated being New Margaret. I hated being who I was. I was ready to be done now. Too many places and too many things seen—it was too much now.

Some religious people play Pollyanna. Nothing is that bad. God is good. I’m fine. But not O’Connor. In the best traditions of Jeremiah and Job, she does not hold back her faith struggles,

So, I told him how I quit a ministry I had served for seven years. How my younger brother, Dustin, stopped loving me, my boyfriend stopped loving me, and God stopped loving me. How I wept every time I went to chapel—how I would try to sing worship songs but choked on tears and a tight throat. How my faith was everything to me, and it was just gone, and I couldn’t get it back.

She does get to a place of relative peace—but like the biblical Job, she is not the same person any longer. Her grief, loss, and struggle has made her wiser, calmer, and more centered. It was no easy journey, as the most meaningful are not, but she could write the following:

If I don’t have my family, and I don’t have my team, then I have nothing and I am no one.

Sometimes, that’s what it takes. It should also be noted, then, that God has been worth every ounce of suffering I have ever endured. And he will continue to be so.

I do not recommend many books about faith because I find most of them maudlin with little sound theology or the rawness of living this life. This one is an exception. While O’Connor’s struggles are perhaps not ours, if we have lived long enough, we will understand the ravages of grief and pain on our soul, our relationships, and our life.

This book will make your heart hurt, it will have you nodding through tears—both out of sadness and out of joy.