Book: Dispatches From Grief
Author: Danielle Crittenden
Pages: 207
This is my 146th read for the year
What Amazon Says:
On a February morning, Danielle Crittenden's world cleaved in two: the life before her daughter Miranda was found dead in her Brooklyn apartment, and the life after. In this luminous memoir, Crittenden maps the territory of profound loss with the clarity of a foreign correspondent filing reports from a country no parent ever wishes to visit. With unflinching honesty and unexpected grace, she chronicles not just the shattering impact of a child's death, but the strange afterlife of grief itself - the way it infiltrates grocery stores and social media, transforms old friendships and forges new ones, and ultimately reshapes the mourner as fundamentally as it has reshaped the world. Here is grief in all its terrible specificity: the police call that changes everything, the surreal task of choosing a burial dress, the well-meaning friends who offer advice about "stages" that don't exist. But here too is love in its most distilled form - a mother's meditation on a daughter who commanded dinner tables at 12 and who transformed from a precocious girl into a sparkling young woman living her dreams in NY. Crittenden brings a journalist's eye to the landscpae of loss, coining the perfect term for those who try to explain grief to the grieving, finding dark comedy in a hotel clerk's relentless cheerfulness. It will speak to anyone who has loved deeply, lost profoundly, and wondered how to continue when continuation seems impossible.
This was a heartbreaking book. It is a short book, and I read it all in one sitting. Make sure you have your tissues as you read along with a mother's greatest fear and what happens after.
Stars: 4.5
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