In the book Letters to Jennifer by James Pattersons, there is an important lesson that Grandma Sam teaches Jennifer. While Jennifer remembers summers spent at her grandmother's house and all the important lessons Sam taught her, Jennifer remembers the time when she was about to leave and her grandmother gave her a jar to fill with shells and sand. Jennifer kept coming back and Grandma Sam kept sending her back out saying the jar wasn't full. Finally Sam told her to insert the large shells and rocks first, then fill it with sand and smaller shells that would fall into the cracks. Sam told Jennifer, “that living life was like putting the beach in a jar. The point wasn't to include everything; it was to deal with the most important things first – the big, beautiful rocks – the most precious people and experiences – and fit the lesser things around them” (Patterson 88). This really stuck with Jennifer throughout her life. When something important happened to her, she put 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 smoothly in Jennifer's life until one day she receives a phone call from her grandmother's friend telling her that her grandmother has been hospitalized and is in a coma after tripping and falling. 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 law that letters tell the true story of... halfway down the paper... real life was about to begin. But there was always some obstacle in the way, something to overcome first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. I finally realized that these obstacles were my life” (134 Patterson). She has realized that all the challenges thrown at her make her a better person. Weights- The weights symbolize Jennifer's strength. She was going through difficult times, she lost her husband in a drowning accident, her grandmother was in a coma and she finds out 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 forever” (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 little girl Sam..