Accidental Grieving

It’s unsettling to read about someone who is in anguish and coming apart at the seams. At the same time, Maryanne Pope’s book A Widow’s Awakening is a heartwarming story of her spirit’s ability to endure one of the hardest experiences we will ever face — the death of someone we love. 

Grieving In the Woods

Book: Here If You Need Me, Kate Braestrup

Kate Braestrup writes about her life after husband Drew, a Maine state trooper, was killed by a driver who lost control. This isn’t a memoir of grieving. It’s a memoir of learning to live with grief.

She accepts the cards she’s been dealt, having learned from the loss of a beloved family pet when she was a teenager, that death was part of life. She buried her dog with her own hands and stacked rocks on top to keep animals out. She rebuilt that stack six times until she thought it was right for honoring her friend.

Creative Grief

Book: This Angel On My Chest, Leslie Pietrzyk

Creative Grief. Two words you don’t often see paired together.

Leslie Pietrzyk’s book is a collection of stories based on the real events of her husband’s death at age 37 to a heart attack, but it’s told in the guise of fiction. She speaks about the concerns of grief in 16 different ways using an assortment of characters. Each story presents one hard truth about grief.

Making the account fictional frees Pietrzyk to add in details that she wished had happened and include dialogue that she wished people had said that would have helped her explain her grief to others better.

Like the Stars

Book: Light Of One Star, Anne Fischer Juhlmann

Anne Juhlmann has published the journal she kept of her daily life taking care of her two sons, Zach and Sam, who developed Mitochondrial Disease when they were young and died within a few years of each other. It’s a story of strength, heartbreak and love, and it will make you laugh, cry and hurt.

Anne’s book joins other moving accounts of parents writing about the death of their children, particularly Emily Rapp’s (Black) account of her son Ronan’s death to Tay-Sachs at age two (Still Point of the Turning World), and Elea Acheson’s blog posts and writings in the Huffington Post about her son Vasu dying of kidney cancer at age six.

Death of a Child

Book: Still Point of the Turning World, Emily Rapp

            Emily Rapp’s son Ronan died before his third birthday. I knew of Emily through one of her friends, so I won’t pretend to say that I understand what she feels or thinks about the loss of her child. I lost my wife early. There are similarities, but there are also significant differences.

            The cause of Ronan’s death was Tay-Sachs, a genetic defect that kills every baby born with it within the first four years of life. Over the months, the infants increasingly lose their ability to see, hear, feel, touch, move, and breathe. There is no treatment and no cure. Soon after Ronan was born, he began to die.