In the book Letters to Jennifer by James Pattersons, there is an important lesson that Grandma Sam teaches Jennifer. As Jennifer remembers the summers she spent at her grandmother's house and all the important lessons Sam taught her, Jennifer remembers when she was about to leave and her grandmother gave her a pot to fill with shells and sand. Jennifer kept coming back and Grandma Sam would send her out saying the pot wasn't full. Finally, Sam told him to put the big shells and rocks in first, then fill it with sand and small shells that would fall into the cracks. Sam told Jennifer: “That life was like putting the beach in a jar. The goal was not to integrate everything; it was about attending first to the most important things – the big, beautiful rocks – the most precious people and experiences – and integrating the lesser things around them” (Patterson 88) . This really stuck with Jennifer throughout her life. When something big happened to her, she pushed aside the small, unimportant things, like the newspaper, and focused on the big things, Sam and Brendan. Jennifer is a writer who writes three columns each week for a Chicago-based newspaper. Everything is going well in Jennifer's life until one day she receives a call from one of her grandmother's friends telling her that her grandmother has been admitted to the hospital and is in a coma afterward. having tripped and fallen. Jennifer packs her bags and rushes to Lake Geneva to visit her grandmother. After returning to her grandmother's house for the night, she finds a bundle of letters addressed to her, held together with a piece of old thread. Opening the first one, she reads that the letters tell the real story where... middle of paper... was about to begin, real life. But there was always an obstacle in the way, something to settle first, unfinished business, time still to go, a debt to pay. Then life would begin. Eventually, I realized that these obstacles were my life” (134 Patterson). She realized that all the challenges thrown at her made her a better person. weights- Weights symbolize Jennifer's strength. She was going through difficult times, she lost her husband to a drowning, her grandmother was in a coma and she discovers that the man she is in love with has brain cancer. Sam writes: “I just want to tell you this important thing. Don’t rule out love for good” (78 Patterson). She decides to stay with Brendan and help him fight some of the most important battles of his life, and to remember her grandmother in a special way by naming her baby girl Sam..