Twice
by Mitch Albom
Post Author: Pepper Scott
I did not read this book alone. That is the first thing I want to say.
Terry and I had been reading Mitch Albom together for years. When MS began to take away the small, ordinary things, reading was one of them. The ability to hold a book. The stamina to follow a page for long. I started reading aloud. I became both voices. It was one of the most intimate things we ever shared, and we had many things to share.
Mitch Albom was our author. Not mine, not his. Ours. His earlier work, the books that circle around death and what comes after, those were the ones we returned to most. Not because we were drawn to darkness. Because those books did what only the best writing can do: they made us more grateful to be here. More grateful to be here together. Knowing that our time was finite made the ordinary moments shine more, not less.
Terry passed away more than a year ago. I read Twice on my own.
Or so I believed, somewhere in the early pages.
Twice is the story of Alfie Logan, who discovers at age eight that he can relive any moment in his life and make a different choice. He grows up using this gift to fix mistakes, avoid danger, and love more perfectly. He finds Gianna, the woman who feels inevitable. But human desire is not easily satisfied, and Alfie's wandering heart leads him to the one rule he cannot outrun: once you undo a love, it cannot be reclaimed.
The premise sounds fantastical. The experience of reading it is not. Albom is too careful a writer for magic to stay weightless. Every second chance in this book lands with the full gravity of a real decision. Alfie gets to try again, and again, and the story never lets us forget that trying again is not the same as getting it right.
The unbreakable rule stopped me cold. Love, once forsaken, is gone. Not changed. Not redirected. Gone.
I sat with that for a long time.
I have my own quiet list of things I might have done differently. I suspect most people do. This book did not ask me to abandon that list. It asked me to look at it more honestly. And when I did, I found that almost everything on it was small. The large things, the choosing of Terry, the years of reading together, the ordinary Saturdays and the difficult ones, I would not touch.
If I had Alfie's gift, I know with certainty what I would do. I would choose Terry again. Without hesitation. And I would try to be twice better in the ways that mattered most: more present, more generous with my attention, more willing to say the quiet things out loud.
That is the gift this book gave me. Not the fantasy of a redo. But the clarity that what I had was worth having.
Somewhere around the middle of the story, I stopped feeling like a solitary reader. Terry seemed to be there, just slightly, leaning in. Eavesdropping on my thoughts, the way he sometimes did.
Mitch Albom has a gift for writing books that seem to know what you are carrying. Twice knew.
Read it if you have loved someone well. Read it if you are learning to hold both grief and gratitude in the same breath. Read it if you want a story that will ask something real of you, and offer something real in return.
Read my personal reflection: A Second Chance at Everything?
Affiliate link: Twice
