Review: End of the Hour by Meghan Riordan Jarvis
Title: End of the Hour: A Therapist’s Memoir
Author: Meghan Riordan Jarvis
Published: 1st November 2023
Genre: Memoir
Age: Adult
What’s it About?
Meghan Riordan Jarvis is a trauma therapist who helps patients process grief, trauma, and loss. However, after her father died following a long battle with cancer and her mother unexpectedly passed away shortly afterwards during a family vacation, she found herself on the opposite side of the chair and requiring the same kind of therapy she had spent nearly two decades providing. End of the Hour is her memoir in which she tells the story of how she faced the hardest years of her life, fell apart, and slowly put herself back together.
My whole body rang like a church bell struck by lightning. I couldn't breathe or move. Was I the only one who’d felt it? My chest thickened into a block of ice that felt like a blend of fear and dread.
Opinions:
I’m going to begin this review by start by saying that I listened to End of the Hour (I highly recommend experiencing this on audiobook if you can) about eight months after the death of my own mum from cancer when I was - and still am - deep in the midst of my own personal grief journey. That meant I could connect very deeply to the story here, both in singular moments and shared experiences like holding the hand of a departed loved one or the pain of making call after call to relay the news, and in the overall feelings that last for months and years after. Jarvis refers to herself as a “child of trauma” having experienced a tragedy at a young age and this also was all too relatable for me - mine happened at age five.
As a result, I found listening to End of the Hour to be an extremely cathartic experience. Most of us will experience grief and trauma at some time in our lives and this book helped remind me that everyone will struggle with that, even someone as well-versed in coping mechanisms as it is possible to be. There is no right or wrong way to handle grief (with a few obvious exceptions) and we will all find our unique path through it. That being said, I found it immensely helpful to hear someone else talking about their path and identify with the thoughts, feelings and experiences I shared. I can’t say whether it would speak as strongly to a reader who has yet to experience deep grief, but I would certainly recommend this book to anyone who has yet to go down that road but who wants to support a loved one who has.
Wild pain gripped my knees and I suddenly needed to stand. I rose with an urgency that went against my intense desire to never move. I wanted to stay as close to my dimming light as possible.
One thing I do want to point out about this book is that the author is extremely privileged in how she can handle her breakdown. Not only is she, quite obviously, educated in what she is experiencing and therefore able to understand what she is experiencing in a way few of us could, but when it all gets too much, she is financially able to pause her paid job and fly across the country to spend several weeks at a specialist “trauma camp” doing equine therapy, trust falls, and more at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars. This is an opportunity that is simply out of reach for the majority of people who will go through an experience like hers, and it would have been nice to see that fact acknowledged more.
However, even with that point noted, this was still an incredible book and one I’m so glad to have found at just the right time. Many thanks to Zibby Books and Libro.fm for the ARC.
Rating: 5/5