Category Archives: A Walk to Remember

For my last independent reading blog post on the book A Walk to Remember by Nicholas Sparks, I analyzed the ending. I tried to show that a fairly achieved ending may not reveal all the details, but completes the story all the same.

In Nicholas Sparks’ book A Walk to Remember, the main conflict is internal, and creates suspense through the character’s emotions rather than the actual, physical events in the book. As Landon said in the opening pages of the book, “First you will smile, and then you will cry” (xi). In every way, it’s a bittersweet story, a story of smiling and tears and smiling through tears. It only makes sense, then, that the ending should resolve the conflict in the same way.

When Landon first learns that Jamie is dying of leukemia, he feels both helpless and hopeless. His life was radically when he fell in love with someone he always thought he was insurmountably incompatible with, and now is being radically changed again as he watches Jamie die from the sidelines, unable to do anything to help. So, desperately and not knowing what else to do, he begins to pray for a miracle.

His desperation is growing – at one point, he is nearly numb with it. He prays for a miracle, which in it of itself is hugely significant. Before Jamie, he would never have dreamed of praying outside of church. It showed how utterly and irrevocably different he is from the boy he was at the beginning of the story – how his time with Jamie, however short it was, changed him in a way that the past seventeen years of his life could not. Even as it seems that Jamie becomes weaker with each passing moment, they are, in a way, happy.

In the prologue of the book, Landon states, “There are times when I wish I could roll back the clock and take all the sadness away, but I have the feeling that if I did, the joy would be gone as well” (x). Every story, every lifetime, comes with both joy and sorrow, both bitterness and laughter; there couldn’t be one without the other. And so, the ending to Landon’s story is not happy, yet it isn’t unhappy, nor is it exactly indeterminate. There is no cliffhanger, but there is a feeling of wanting to know more, and there is no clear resolution, yet there is a sense of completion. It leaves the reader uncertain of Jamie’s fate, but Landon’s is clear: he still loves her and will never have the desire to stop. The book ends in a way that solved the conflict in a way that neither a definite unhappy ending nor a definite happy ending could, because it shows that the main conflict of the story was not Jamie’s, but Landon’s. In every way, it was his story, his walk to remember. He ends with the words, “There’s one thing I still haven’t told you: I now believe, by the way, that miracles can happen,” (240).

Following are three journal entries as I imagined Landon, the protagonist from Nicholas Sparks’ A Walk to Remember, would have written them. Through them, I tried to represent Landon’s inner conflict: his indecision, his turmoil, and most of all, his desperate bewilderment as his life was changed forever. Though the book was written in first person, I tried to delve a little deeper into Landon’s thoughts and focus a little more his heart because I didn’t have to follow the boundaries of the ongoing plot as the author probably did as he was writing the book. Because it was written in first person, I few of the things that Landon writes in his journal are actually stated in the book, and are referenced with a number and the page they were on at the end.

January 5, 1959

She’s dying. Jamie. Jamie, my Jamie, is dying.

She can’t be. She’s too young to die. We’re all too young to die.

The worst part? When she told me, it made sense. In the worst way, I understood. It made sense, suddenly. Why she had wanted this Christmas at the orphanage to be the best one ever. Why she didn’t plan to go to college. Why she’d given me her Bible. It all made perfect sense, yet it made no sense at all.¹ Because I couldn’t understand it. Jamie was dying. Is dying.

She had leukemia. She’d known it since last summer, and she had stopped responding to treatments. Leukemia. A cruel disease, that killed from the inside out, that broke your strength and drained you of hope before it killed you. While everyone that loved you watched.

I take back what I said earlier. The worst part isn’t understanding, it’s having to watch Jamie die, and being unable to do anything but that – watch. It’s having to stand from the side and watching her own body kill her.

We were on the street when she told me. It was cold, and she was cold, so pale in the bare light of the streetlamps. We cried together on the street for a long time. There was an older couple walking by, braced against the wind, holding hands, and all I could think about was how we that would never be Jamie and me. We would never walk hand in hand with graying hair on our heads, we would never sit on the porch and rock back and forth in the summer air, we would never walk through the woods as the leaves started to change colors. We would never do a thousand things, because she wouldn’t live that long. The doctors gave her a year. She had stopped responding to treatments, and they couldn’t do anything more.

Only a miracle could save her.²

January 27, 1959

Every once in a while, a traveling preacher would set up a tent in Beaufort and people would come to watch as he healed people. Once, one of them even made our deaf baker, Old Man Sweeney, hear again.

So yesterday, I began to pray for a miracle.

They were supposed to happen all the time. Every chapter of the Bible has the Lord doing a spectacular something or the other. So I opened up the Bible Jamie gave me, too. I don’t know what I was looking for. Answers, maybe. A way to get a miracle.

I ask her every day if there’s something I can do to help, knowing that there isn’t. Maybe one day I’ll go to medical school and stumble across the cure to leukemia, but it’ll be too late for her. What else can I do? I know she’s afraid. I am, too. I know she’s in pain. I would take the pain for her, if I could. But I can’t. All I can do when I look at her is think about the day when I won’t be able to. So I spend all my time at school thinking about her, wishing I could see her right then, but when I go to her house, I don’t know what to say.

We started reading the Bible together. It somehow seemed like the right thing to do, but my heart was nonetheless telling me that there still might be something more. At night I lay awake, thinking about it.³

April 17, 1999

I remember when it struck me, the answer to all my nights of restless tossing. Not a miracle, but an answer.

I knew what more I could do.

Hegbert was shocked. They all were, and I guess they had a reason to be. They all tried to talk me out of it, thinking that I was only doing it for Jamie, especially when she said yes. What they didn’t understand, and I had to make clear to them, was that I needed to do it for me. I was in love with her, so deeply that I didn’t care if she was sick. I didn’t care that we wouldn’t have long together. None of those things mattered to me. All I cared about was doing something that my heart had told me was the right thing to do. In my mind, it was the first time God had ever spoke directly to me, and I knew with certainty that I wasn’t going to disobey.⁴

She told me once, before I knew she was sick, that what she wanted to get married. And that, I could give her.

We were married on March 12, 1959. Jamie insisted on walking down the isle, though she had been in bed for weeks. When I asked her about it, she said, “It’s very important to me, Landon. It’s part of my dream, remember?”

Sometimes, I can’t help but wonder at her faith.

I held my breath as, with all the strength she had left, stood up shakily, and then somehow found more to take her first step. I don’t think anyone was breathing then. They could only sit silently in wonder. In times and places such as these, there was no time for something as insignificant as drawing breath.

In what seemed both like forever and the blink of an eye, she reached my side. There were bumps along the way, hesitations and stumbles when I didn’t think she had the strength to go on. But she always did. It was, I remembered thinking, the most difficult walk anyone ever had to make.

In every way, a walk to remember.⁵

1. “Why she had wanted…no sense at all” Pg. 192
2. “Only a…save her” Pg. 195
3. “All I can do…thinking about it” Pg. 203-204
4. “What they didn’t…disobey” Pg. 233-234
5. “It was…remember” Pg. 237

I am reading the book A Walk to Remember by Nicholas Sparks. Through my poem, I tried to show how Landon felt as his life was changed in a way he had never dreamed.

A Walk to Remember

 

On the front porch step as the skies are gray

I look at the sky and remember.

Roll back the clock to the time and the day,

To the year I walked with you.

 

Innocence returning,

Lessons of age fade away.

The wheels of memory are turning

To the time when life was a game.

 

Never had I dreamed that fate would bring us together,

And twist our roads to one.

Yet your hand was in mine as we set out on the endeavor,

And took the first step down the road we’d never forget.

 

With you by my side I learned to look

Through eyes not my own.

And while my steps were tentative yours never shook

As you showed me the depths of the heart, my heart.

 

Then came the cold wind as the day drained of light,

The white puffs of our breath hung before us.

And I knew before you spoke to the night,

For the truth in your eyes spoke louder.

 

We cried in the street that night,

 Darkness settling on our shoulders,

Both of us knowing that we were fighting a losing fight,

As the silence pounded in our ears.

 

There was doubt and fear settling in my heart for you,

Yet it was yours that stayed steady.

It was your smile that stayed strong and true

When all the other eyes held tears.

 

And with your eyes locked in mine,

You said to me then,

“Step by step, hand in hand,

We’ll walk this road and back again.”

 

And it was with that promise beating in my heart

That I closed my eyes

And remembered back to the start,

To the moment you saw me and smiled.

 

And realized that from the fragrance of spring

To the dark days of December

That this would always be

A walk to remember.

 

And now as I sit as the skies cool to embers

The bloom of lilacs in the air,

I smile and remember

The year I walked with you.

 

            I tried to write this poem in a way similar to how the book was written and convey both Landon’s joy and sadness. As he in the prologue of the book, “First you will smile, and then you will cry” (xi). I focused on the mood, tone, and I tried to include the plot and show how it affected the main characters. Through Landon’s voice, I also tried to characterize Jamie’s optimistic, ever-cheerful attitude and represent Landon as a dynamic character by showing how drastically he was changed by that year in his life when he met Jamie. I think this book really focused on showing how things like love and death come so suddenly that they change everything completely and irrevocably, and I tried to show that through this poem.