I couldn't help but reach out to author K.J. Ramsey as I began her latest book, "The Place Between Our Pains: A Memoir of What Joy Can Survive."

I had to tell her that this would be my latest "hospital" book, my latest book to be read while enduring yet another hospitalization during my sixty-year long journey with Spina Bifida. This journey, to be honest, was rather simple. Months in the planning, this was to be an overnight stay to remove yet another kidney stone to be followed by a week of recovery.

I was only a few pages into "The Place Between Our Pains" when I cried for the first time.

Okay. Okay. I sobbed. There, are you happy?

I laughed. I cried. I grieved. I remembered. I felt lonely. I felt fear. I dreamed. I even felt a little envy, yes envy.

"The Place Between Our Pains" is unapologetically raw. It is a memoir, a bit of a change of pace for Ramsey who often dwells within the spaces of lyrical self-help and poetry with a rich, more progressive theology layered in. "The Place Between Our Pains" is, however, K.J., still inherently helpful because that's in her bones (Sorry, K.J. Dark humor won.). However, the mission at hand here is less about self-help and more about establishing a body-centered way of living so rebellious and so defiantly committed to joy that not even the deepest, darkest hurts can snag it away.

If you know Ramsey, and you should, you know her as this deeply nature-committed soul who thrives on trails, practically orgasms with wildflowers, and embraces truth-telling. Most of us who follow Ramsey know the framework of this story -at one of the healthiest points she's had in recent years, Ramsey went off on a journey across national parks only to return and be thrust straight into a harrowing and life-threatening journey.

There's a question that seems to radiate throughout every trial, every tribulation, and every moment of despair - is joy still possible in this place?

Time and again, Ramsey answers with defiantly dark humor and twisted sarcasm "Yes. Yes, it is." This doesn't mean we're bathed in toxic positivity.We're not. About the only thing I'd call toxic to be found in "The Place Between Our Pains" would be the medications that hurt, the medical professionals that gaslight, and the systems that too often keep us grasping for a joy that seems ever so elusive.

If you know anything about my own story, you know that I'm a now sixty-year-old adult with Spina Bifida having long outlived my life expectancy along with the expectations for the quality of that life. I've had right around 100 surgeries. I'm also a paraplegic, double amputee, and two-time cancer survivor. I'm a survivor of sexual abuse and someone whose life has been filled with grief in a myriad of expressions.

I'm not K.J. Ramsey nor is this my story, however, Ramsey writes with such intimacy and universality that one cannot help but feel the truth of her words in our own life experiences.

And yet, time and again Ramsey's experience has been similar to my own. Yes, joy can survive and thrive through our darkest valleys and fights to stay alive.

"The Place Between Our Pains" doesn't sugarcoat the journey nor minimize the pain whether it's disbelieving doctors, bodies we can't control, medical debt, or the unfathomable truth of learning how to love the person we have become through all of our challenges.

I've long adored both Ramsey and her writing. In "The Place Between Our Pains," I couldn't help but fall in love with this husband of hers, Ryan, whose presence, grace, steadfastness, and occasional fits of brutal honesty are sublime. While it's hard for us who know Ramsey through her online presence to imagine anything but quirky humor and therapeutic insights, you don't go through these experiences unscathed and without moments of raw truths, absolute rages, shaking fears, and uncomfortable vulnerability.

"The Place Between Our Pains" is a memoir as much of joy as it is of pain. It is a memoir filled with Ramsey's twisted humor, lyrical storytelling, and vulnerable wonderings. We hear of those weeks and months when we heard less from Ramsey, knowing only bits and pieces of her journey whether she was enduring bedpans (NOTE: I will confess I wondered how she'd gotten this far in the journey without having this experience.), Mayo Clinic visits, uncommon intimacy with in-laws, friends who just kept showing up, and a medical system far too often more interested in perpetuating itself than actually healing its patients.

Why did I cry that first day? And several times after? Because this IS what joy can survive. "The Place Between Our Pains" doesn't just say "show up" in this life you'd never choose - it shows you with aching vulnerability and honesty someone who's doing it and those around her who are doing it and who are living into this idea that love doesn't leave, at least not easily, and that love actually grows when we show up, become village, and experience these things together. Again, that's not toxic positivity (for which Ramsey has little tolerance). It's a recognition that joy survives. Love survives. We are stronger together.

There were times as I read "The Place Between Our Pains" that I ached. Yes, I felt envy. During my cancer journey almost three years ago, I had one particular day when I felt, with absolute conviction, I was dying.

Of course, I didn't. An insightful nurse saw what was going on and took actions that I remain convinced saved my life that day. And yet, I was alone.

I was dying and alone. That still haunts me. I swore to myself I'd not let that happen ever again. Ramsey's storytelling me reminded me of my misguided efforts to be so fiercely independent that I blocked everyone out. I longed for people who visited, who touched, who helped, and who were part of a more hands-on village. I longed for that clinical, impersonal touch to not be the only touch I experience in my life.

And I wept. I wept a lot.

"The Place Between Our Pains" is, indeed, a memoir of what joy can survive. It's a reminder that our stories matter - the entirety of our stories. With refreshingly raw honesty and vulnerable humanity, Ramsey has crafted a lyrical memoir needing to be read by everyone from medical professionals to pastors to those living with chronic illnesses. It left me asking the question for myself "Where has joy survived in my own life?"

Written by Richard Propes
The Independent Critic