Lost in the Stacks: Did I Ever Tell You?

Seven-year-old Gwenny couldn’t remember a time when her mother wasn’t sick. For years she watched her mother take hundreds of pills, drink gallons of carrot juice and try other alternative treatments to cure her metastatic breast cancer. When more conventional treatments also failed, Gwenny’s mom gathered her children together and lovingly told them that her disease was terminal, she was going to die. 

Her eyesight failing, her strength diminished, Gwenny’s mom nevertheless began her great gift of love. Surrounded by patterned boxes and colored ribbons, she gathered gifts and wrote loving notes, packing a trunk for each child with packages to be opened at special times. As she explained in a letter to Gwenny, these packages weren’t about the gifts, but a way for Gwenny’s mom to stay in her children’s lives. She could still advise, console, explain, share and love. Above all, love. 

How can a book about a young mother dying be anything but heartbreaking? Yet Did I Ever Tell You? by Genevieve Kingston, is so much more than this. It’s a coming-of-age story as Gwenny tries to process her mother’s death and struggles to leave the safety of home. It’s her mother’s story as well: how a young adventurous woman who adored her children fought like anything to stay alive. And how this same young woman summoned the courage near the end to leave her children with the tools they needed to create happy lives for themselves.