One of my all time favorite movies is A Walk to Remember with Mandy Moore and Shane West. I have seen the movie many, many times and it still makes me cry at the end. I just finished reading the novel by Nicholas Sparks and it was equally as great as the movie. If you haven’t heard of this movie (or book), you are pretty much living under a rock. Here is the plot summary on the back of the book if you are feeling out of the loop, “Every April, when the wind smells of both the sea and lilacs, Landon Carter remembers 1958, his last year at Beaufort high. Landon had dated a girl or two, and even once sworn he’d been in love. Certainly the last person he thought he’d fall for was Jamie, the shy, almost ethereal daughter of the town’s Baptist minister…Jamie, who was destined to show him the depths of the human heart—and the joy and pain of living.”
Ever since I heard of this movie, I thought the title just meant the walk of Jamie and Landon together and the path that their lives led them. This was completely altered today when I finished the book. It clearly told me what “A Walk to Remember” meant. *Spoiler Alert* If you don’t want to know the ending of the movie, don’t read on (which kinda sucks for you because now you don’t know what the title really means…so, go watch the movie, then come back!). So, at the end of the movie we know that Jamie is dying of leukemia and Landon fulfills her biggest wish, he marries her in the church where her parents married. In the movie, Jamie looks healthy and stable during the wedding and is able to walk down the aisle with ease. But in the book, she is pushed into the church on a wheelchair and leaned onto her dad for support and stability. In the book, she is extremely weak and has to pause in the middle of the aisle to take a breath and gain some strength. It’s this moment that the book is named after. It is written, “Then Jamie and Hegbert slowly made their way down the aisle, while everyone in the church sat silently in wonder. Halfway down the aisle, Jamie suddenly seemed to tire, and they stopped while she caught her breath. Her eyes closed, and for a moment I didn’t think she could go on. I know that no more than ten or twelve seconds elapsed, but it seemed much longer, and finally she nodded slightly. With that, Jamie and Hegbert started moving again, and I felt my heart surge with pride. It was, I remembered thinking, the most difficult walk anyone ever had to make. In every way, a walk to remember.”
Sweetest thing ever. 