Hit Hard

By Patrick McLeod and Tammy McLeod

Tyndale House     2019

268 pages    Spiritual Memoir

We have all experienced great loss in our lives at one time or another, whether through death, divorce, Covid, and on and on. In their book, Hit Hard, Pat and Tammy McLeod explore the type of loss called “ambiguous loss”, a type of loss where there doesn’t seem to be a finality, and the grief is ongoing with no closure and no ultimate validation. Wikipedia defines ambiguous loss as “a loss that occurs without closure or clear understanding. This kind of loss leaves a person searching for answers, and thus complicates and delays the process of grieving, and often results in unresolved grief.” It is a concept developed by Dr. Pauline Boss and seems extremely appropriate as we are currently engulfed in the pandemic with loss ensnaring almost all of us in one form or another.

Several years ago, Zach McLeod, the McLeod’s second child, suffered a severe head injury on the football field, and since that moment his life and the life of his family has never been the same. They tell their family story in the book Hit Hard. The couple alternate in sharing their memories of that moment, the toll it took on their son and their family, and how through very hard emotional and spiritual work, they have been able to move beyond that tragic moment and deal in positive ways with the ambiguous loss it brought to them. They say that the purpose of the book is to relate to other families and individuals as they attempt to move beyond their own loss. The McLeods have just recently told their story in a video they made in February of this year, as a source of hope for families dealing with loss from Covid 19. It can be found here.

I was impressed by the huge supporting community the McLeods had around them as they dealt with this loss as well as the way in which they have channeled their loss over the years.  On the other hand, I think that they acknowledge that you can feel very alone, even when you are in a huge community. Both Pat and Tammy are pastors involved in student ministry in the Boston area; both have advanced degrees in ministry. They also are involved in mission in South Africa.

Hit Hard is extremely well written—thoughtful and insightful as well as devastating in the content. The intended audience, I believe, is anyone who is experiencing ambiguous loss, although it would be appropriate for everyone grieving loss. It is also very inspirational—showing that such great loss can lead to positive outcomes and great satisfaction.

Here are two more sites for those intrigued with their story: an interview with the family and the couple’s website.  However, when I Googled Pat and Tammy McLeod, I was able to find many articles, TV interviews, and pictures of the family over the years.

I appreciated very much the publicist sending me the book to read, and I would recommend it as a source of encouragement and hope.

 

Hieroglyphics

 By Jill McCorkle

Algonquin     2020

320 pages     Literary

Hieroglyphics are ancient Egyptian writings composed of pictures. One reads through the pictures to try to understand the message. The hieroglyphics in the book by the same name by Jill McCorkle are the attempts to piece together the message of the lives of four people, Lil and  Frank, an elderly couple, Shelly, a single mother working as a court stenographer, and her young son Harvey, who is sure there is a ghost in their house.

Each chapter continues the story of one of the characters, each of whom have suffered from great loss in their lives. Each is in a constant struggle to create a life for himself/herself despite that loss. Lil  and Frank have moved from Boston to the North Carolina community where their daughter lives, and where Frank grew up. Lil is trying to put together a journal for her children as a way of explaining how her life happened, how she and Frank forged a life together, and how she wants to find peace before she dies. Frank, on the other hand, becomes obsessed with the house where he grew up and the root cellar where he stored his treasures. Shelly and Harvey now live in that house; Shelly refuses to let Frank come into the house, and Harvey worries that Frank may be one of the ghosts that has been haunting him.

The review in the New York Journal of Books has an stunning conclusion to its analysis of the book: “McCorkle is an insightful, skillful writer and these characters have led complex lives. She takes her time and lets them unpack their baggage slowly, a piece at a time. So when McCorkle suddenly speeds to and through the finish, with Jason—our least known character—making and revealing a major discovery, along with Lil’s revelations and what some may consider the quick end of the novel, is McCorkle suggesting that this is what happens with our lives? We think we’ll have time to make decisions, to work something out, but then, surprise! it’s over and we’re gone. We can go back and reread McCorkle’s ending, of course. No such privilege with our own.”

I am shocked that I had such a difficult time getting through Hieroglyphics. I identified completely with Lil and Frank, in part because of their age, and also because of the grief they carried. The concluding thought tore me through to the quick. “We think we’ll have time to make decisions, to work something out, but then, surprise! It’s over and we’re gone.” I think that I identified too closely with the theme. I found myself underlining passage after passage—brilliantly conceived and written by McCorkle. Her insights into the aging couple, the secretive and flawed Shelly, and scared little Harvey enmesh the reader completely into the lives of these characters. Here are a couple of passages that I found particularly moving.

“And now Frank does see. He understands how memories of what was good can be so painful you might choose not to look.”

Lil: “Sometimes I feel like my life is all laid out before me; dots connecting, patterns shaped and designed, words naming and classifying me.”

I grew nostalgic as I read Hieroglyphics. I realized that I have always been an extremely forward looking person, always trying to move ahead. Even when my husband died leaving me with 3 children, I moved us forward. I never dwelt on my grief—and perhaps unfortunately, never dwelt on my children’s grief. I said to my 40-something son yesterday that perhaps we should revisit Daddy, and share some memories of that time in our lives. The incredible thing about Hieroglyphics is that it put me in touch with my own pain and longing.

Thank you Jill McCorkle with giving a moment with myself that caused me to reflect on my life’s path.

Hieroglyphics was released in July to a great deal of acclaim. Here is the author’s website.

The Third Hotel

By Laura van den Berg

Farrar, Straus & Giroux     2018

224 pages     Fiction

I have spent 3 days reading The Third Hotel, and I have no idea what I have just finished. One reviewer called it “strange, unsettling, and profound from start to finish.” Ok. I believe that.

Don’t quite know where to start. Here is the summary:

“In Havana, Cuba, a widow tries to come to terms with her husband’s death―and the truth about their marriage―in Laura van den Berg’s surreal, mystifying story of psychological reflection and metaphysical mystery.
Shortly after Clare arrives in Havana, Cuba, to attend the annual Festival of New Latin American Cinema, she finds her husband, Richard, standing outside a museum. He’s wearing a white linen suit she’s never seen before, and he’s supposed to be dead. Grief-stricken and baffled, Clare tails Richard, a horror film scholar, through the newly tourist-filled streets of Havana, clocking his every move. As the distinction between reality and fantasy blurs, Clare finds grounding in memories of her childhood in Florida and of her marriage to Richard, revealing her role in his death and reappearance along the way.” 

Yeah! I told you. The Third Hotel is strange and unsettling. I looked up the definition of magical realism in my search to put a name on the genre in which the book might fit. Wikipedia defines it this way: “a genre of narrative fiction that, while encompassing a range of subtly different concepts, expresses a primarily realistic view of the real world while also adding or revealing magical elements.” I believe this fits the bill, although in many ways, van den Berg’s writing defies categorization.

At its heart The Third Hotel is a meditation on grief and loss. Clare has just lost her husband Richard. Her level of grief is profound, and when she sees him from a distance in Havana, she follows him as she seeks answers to all the unanswered questions of her life and marriage. When she finally meets up with him and they take a journey into the mountains of Cuba, the mystery that is her husband is amplified and her grief is compounded rather than appeased. The reader never comes to a conclusion about who or what Clare is seeing when she discovers Richard; is he a ghost, a doppelganger? “She ordered herself to stop recognizing him, since what she was recognizing was plainly impossible, but then she crept closer and saw just how possible it was.”

What is absolutely certain is that Laura van den Berg is an incredible writer. The setting, the imagery, and the language is absolutely breathtaking. I loved the descriptions of Cuba, and I felt like I was on the scene every moment, even if I didn’t quite see Richard like Clare did (or did she actually see Richard?). We are so very clearly exposed to the inner workings of Clare’s mind; “the gap between her inner reality and the world around felt so enormous she feared she was going to be swallowed up.” All the way through the novel, we are privvy to Clare’s inner reality. We are never sure what to believe—what she is seeing. One of my favorite lines relating to Clare is: “the ice cube she had pressed against her heart in childhood was proving slow to thaw.”

The New York Times reviewer cautions the reader looking for noir, a mystery, or a thriller. He says,  “Don’t take the bait when “The Third Hotel” starts voguing like a thriller. Instead, read it as the inscrutable future cult classic it probably is, and let yourself be carried along by its twisting, unsettling currents.”

In his praise for the novel and its author, the Washington Post reviewer says, “The most transforming kind of fiction is capable of causing a dislocation of reality: a bit of the bizarre, a lot kept beneath the surface and worlds opening within worlds.”

I recommend The Third Hotel with caution. Look out so that you don’t become crazed trying to figure out the plot; rejoice in the vivid descriptions of Cuba and the incredible writing; and breathe a sigh of relief when it is finished—if indeed it is finished. 

Additionally, I am done reading about grief-stricken widows for a while. I feel like my summer has been filled with their stories. On to other stuff. 

Becoming Starlight: A Shared Death Journey from Darkness to Light

By Sharon Prentice PhD

Waterside Press     2018

185 pages     Spiritual

The Shortlist

Although I only read parts of Becoming Starlight by Sharon Prentice, I wanted to share the book with you. It seems that currently there are a plethora of books about grief and the death of spouses and partners. Frankly, I was burned out before Becoming Starlight came from the publicist. I just couldn't relive my own grief journey again. This book, however, appears to be particularly meaningful. The theme of Prentice's memoir is grief as a spiritual journey. Prentice has a “shared death” experience at the moment of her husband’s death. Here is a summary of the book.

“Becoming Starlight is the true story of one woman’s tumultuous relationship with God during the soul-wrenching deaths of her daughter and husband, and her eventual redemption as her soul slipped over to another framework of existence—a realm of pure love and light—by means of a Shared Death Experience (SDE) at the moment of her husband’s death. 

The little known Shared Death Experience—a profound transcendent consciousness—afforded the author a peek into forever-ness, a lifting of the veil between this life and the next.

Deeply embedded in Becoming Starlight is a life-and-death struggle with Spiritual darkness and loss of faith. It’s a story brimming with the stuff of life—tremendous love, agonizing loss, quiet rage, inconsolable sorrow, and a complete fall from Grace. At the heart of it is a war between who lives and dies, a battle that brings us face to face with our own mortality.”

As well as telling the story, the concept of shared death is explored and many examples are given from Prentice’s life experience. In my own experience with death, I know that there are people who wish to die in the presence of family, thus sharing the experience. I also know that there are people who choose to die when they are alone—making death a singular experience. This would be the case for my father, who waited until it was quiet and he was alone. My husband waited until his whole family was in the room. I said, “You can go now. Everyone is here.” And everyone in the room saw and felt his spirit leave his body in a whoosh. This is the type of experience Prentice describes in great detail in her memoir.

If this book has resonance for you, here are some other books that I have read and written about—these are the most recent.

·         Waiting for You at Midnight by Vicki Salloum

·         You Are Not Alone by Debbie Augenthaler

·         Grief Works by Julia Samuel

Here is Sharon Prentice’s website.

Waiting For You at Midnight

By Vicki Salloum

Moonshine Cove     2018

240 pages     Fiction

In Waiting For You At Midnight, Vicki Salloum’s intimate look at grief is raw and very real—so real, in fact, that the reader forgets that it is a novel.

When Arabella Joseph’s husband Logan died of cancer in 2015, she is overcome with grief and fear. She muses, “What am I going to do without you? That is the quintessential question. How can I live a life without you? I am without any defenses. I am scared and alone and in pain.”

The narrative alternates between Arabella’s remembrances of her relationship with Logan and her struggles to move forward with her life after his death. She feels that she was only a whole person when she was with him and she initially has no understanding of what to do and when to do it.

Arabella is a writer, but also a long-time recovered alcoholic/drug addict, so her associates and friends are the people that she meets at the recovery meetings she attends on a nearly daily basis. She looks to the people in the group for friendship and companionship, but her grief and longing is so intense that she is worried that she will relapse. The relationships are powerful, and many of her recovery friends are very supportive and helpful to her. A couple of the men she meets at the meetings are interested in a relationship with her, but they also carry a great deal of baggage.

I was particularly interested in her contemplation on grief and loss. I understood the tragic journey a spouse takes when his/her partner is suffering from cancer—the dissociation, the anger, the unspeakable inability to “solve the problem.” My favorite parts, however, have less to do with Arabella’s struggles after Logan’s death than with the beautiful story of their relationship—how they found each other, how the accepted each other’s failings, and how they grew a loving and engaged marriage.

I wondered about why she wanted to have another relationship so quickly, and why she chose such damaged men to anticipate having a relationship with. Her loneliness was palpable, but the book’s climax doesn’t offer any relief from the pain which continues beyond the book’s climax. The book just stops.

This is not a cheerful book nor is it easy to read. I began it at the beach but had to put it away until I was in a more appropriate setting at home. I did, however, email the author, because in the bio it said that her husband had recently died, and the book was dedicated to him and his life. I asked her why she chose to write a novel rather than a memoir. Here is what she said: “I choose to write my book as fiction because only part of it is autobiographical.  A big part of it is imagination.  Several major events in the book did not happen and many characters in the book, through inspired by people I know, were made up.  When I write, I sometimes start off with what I know and then, working in the unconscious, the imagination takes over and the result is an imaginary world that is only partly autobiographical.  However, in Waiting for You at Midnight, the voice and mood are very real.  The book, written as fiction, accomplished what I wanted it to:  it served as a tribute to my husband.  My love for him was in that book and that's all that counts.”

The value of Waiting for You at Midnight lies in its ability to help the reader understand the depth of the grief experience. At times, it almost was so close to my own grief experience that I had to catch my breath. Another book that is similar in tone but a memoir is You are Not Alone by Debbie Augenthaler.

You Are Not Alone

By Debbie Augenthaler

Everystep Publications     2018

268 pages     Spiritual Memoir

It has been 34 years since my dear husband Lee died of cancer at age 41. It was the most beautiful of all possible deaths, and everyone who was with him as he died saw his spirit leave his body. I was well prepared for his death, and my young children were prepared as well. It had been a long and hard fought battle. As prepared as we were, the grief was with us for a long time. Even 34 years later, as I read You Are Not Alone by Augenthaler, every moment of that death came back into my mind and heart, and I met that grief all over again.

Augenthaler is a psychotherapist in private practice in New York City. She specializes in trauma, grief, and loss. Her book is an attempt to meet her clients personal narration by sharing her own grief story. Part memoir, part self-help, part therapy, Augenthaler begins her account with her husband’s unexpected death. She then takes us on the journey that leads to her renewal and transformation into a new person.

Much of what she shares is of immediate value for persons who are experiencing their own grief or are in preparation for a death of a loved one. She emphasizes that each grief is different and each person’s response is different. However, it is valuable to share stories so people know that they are not alone.

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Another important bit of information concerns asking for help. Augenthaler encourages the grieving to ask for help, whether it be psychological help or physical help. What I learned from my own experience was the people have a tremendous need to give—perhaps even more than the recipient has the need to receive. It is important to graciously receive help. People helped me with the spring gardening, hauling children around, and many, many meals. My teacher friends fed my family every day for the last six weeks of Lee’s life. I could go on and on with the gifts of time, food, and services that people offered.

Interspersed with her story are pauses and meditations that offer insights into grief, strategies to try, beautiful poetry, and other gifts of encouragement and comfort.

You Are Not Alone is a unique and powerful guide for “grief, healing, and hope.” I will pass my copy along to a friend.

Debbie Augenthaler’s website.

Grief Works: Stories of Life, Death, and Surviviing

By Julia Samuel

Scribner     2017

261 pages     Spiritual

The Shortlist

Grief Works by Julia Samuel is a profound look at the process of grief. Samuel is a grief counselor, and the help she offers comes from the stories of the grieving people she has met. Her approach is to listen and offer guidance only when necessary. In explaining grief, she makes a provocative statement that has stayed with me. “The process is in the movement—the back and forth—between the loss and restoration. Sadness, tears, yearning, and preoccupation with the person who has died alternate with present-day tasks, functioning, having hope for the future, and having a break from the grief.”

Samuel tells stories and imparts the knowledge she has gained in dealing with grief in several categories: when a partner dies; when a parent dies; when a sibling dies; when a child dies; and when we face our own death. The conclusion of the book talks about how we can help those who are grieving around us.

This book came to me at an appropriate time. In the last month, we have lost two people close to us—a dear and long-term friend, and the grandfather to several of our grandchildren. One loss was abrupt and unexpected, while the other was prolonged and anticipated. Then today, a notice came that the husband of a friend was killed in an automobile accident. It reminded me that death is always with us, and we need to be always ready to practice empathy with those who are suffering.

Because of my age, I suppose, I read with interest the stories about facing your own death. They were helpful and enlightening. I recommend this book to anyone, because neither we, nor the people around us, can escape death. Reading Grief Works can serve as a reminder that grief and love go hand in hand.

Julia Samuel is a British grief counselor, and a good friend of Princess Diana and the royal family. Grief Works was published in Britain last year and is now available in the US.

All the Time in the World

by Caroline Angell

Henry Holt and Company     2016

324 pages     Fiction 

All the Time in the World is the exceptional first novel by a talented young author, Caroline Angell. It tells the story of a young woman, Charlotte, who has finished a master's degree in music composition but is now working as a nanny for two young boys, George and Matthew McLean, who are the children of Gretchen and Scotty McLean, wealthy New Yorkers. 

A gifted musician, babysitting wasn't in her career plans, but a betrayal by one of her trusted instructors has put Charlotte's career on hold. She falls in love with George and Matthew and finds her employment to be satisfying, although a bit stifling. She considers the job to be good for now; it pays for her life in the city. In the first few pages of the novel, the mother, Gretchen, dies in a taxi accident, and Charlotte's role in the family takes a significance that she had not imagined. The narrative moves backward and forward in time from her first days as the nanny to the day that Gretchen dies to the weeks and months following the tragedy. Charlotte remains as the stabilizing force in the children's lives because Scotty is barely functional. Charlotte's help is what keeps the family going for several months, until the exhaustion of being everyone's everything takes its toll on her well-being. I was impressed that Angell understood the effects of grief for all the family members as well as for Charlotte.

Angell gets a lot of things right. Having just come from a week with grandchildren of the same age, I was impressed that Angell understands the life and times of preschoolers so well, with all the minutia of child care. George and Matthew are very appealing children, and their confusion and grief when their mother dies is heartbreaking. George is too little to really understand what has happened, but as a 5-year-old, Matthew descends into a combative mess that Caroline has to manage every day. 

Angell has used her own experience as a music student, composer, and nanny to form the basis of her novel. But more than that, she draws upon a deep and intuitive understanding of death and grief as it plays out in the lives of a family with young children. The characters are all believable, and their reactions are realistic and relatable. Charlotte is a very sympathetic character. I loved her innate understanding of children and their needs, and I liked how she matured when she was called upon to keep the family functioning. I also appreciated the way she led Scotty through his grief and helped him find a path to wholeness.

 This novel could easily have been based on the experience of our Downey family—albeit the Downey experience occurred more than 30 years ago, when Lee, the father in our family, died of cancer. Little 2-year-old Rachel had no understanding of what was happening, but her brothers and I experienced a grief that lasted for a long time. The depiction of Scotty, the father, is quite true to my experience—a fog that gradually lifted.

I think that it would have been easy for Angell to have tied this novel up in a neat little bundle, like The Sound of Music, with Charlotte marrying her employer and everyone living happily ever after. I was proud of her for not descending to a formulaic ending. The conclusion was far more satisfying. 

As an aside, one detail that I found amusing was about Pale Male, the red-tailed hawk that lives on the facade of a building across from Central Park. My book club had read Red Tails in Love by Marie Winn, so I was familiar with Pale Male. I felt quite smug about knowing that!

As you can tell, All the Time in the World hit fairly close to home for me, bringing back many memories that had laid buried. I did get a bit bogged down in the back and forth of the narration and a lot of details about child care, but I persisted and in the end, I was glad that I did. All the Time in the World is true and heartfelt—it didn't feel like a first novel. Kudos to Caroline Angell.

Caroline Angell's website.

Here is a YouTube video of a review by a young British woman.

Enon

by Paul Harding  

Random House     2013

256 pages      Fiction

Enon by Paul Harding is a painful, existential journey through grief. Written in the first person, it has been called a "tone poem" by one reviewer, and a surreal, apocalyptic odyssey by another. Clearly, Harding has charted new ground with his second novel. Enon is haunting to read and it continues to haunt long after you have set it down.

Charlie Crosby is a small town man, the grandson of the narrator of Harding's Pulitzer Prize winning Tinkers. He is the town handyman--landscaper and house painter--husband, and father of 13-year-old Kate. We barely know his wife Susan, and do not meet Kate in reality because she is killed in a car-bike accident in the book's first scene. All we know of Kate is in the imaginings about her in Charlie's mind. 

So much of Charlie is invested in Kate that when he loses her, his whole world falls apart, and for the year following her death, he wallows around in a grief so profound that it seems he will never recover. When Susan leaves him, he has no one for support. His entire being is consumed with remembrances of Kate, his childhood, and Enon, his home village that has been a part of history since the 1600s.  As he descends into an alcoholic and drug-induced blur, those elements become so confused in his brain that he can't separate one from the other. All of his hallucinations include Kate. He roams the village and the surrounding fields and lake at night and often sleeps behind Kate's grave in the village cemetery. He covers the mirrors in his dirt-encrusted house so that he won't have to look at himself. In his few moments of clarity, he realizes what he is doing to himself, but he is incapable of keeping himself from this long, torturous route to suicide. 

The writing is breathtaking: "I was ravenous for my child and took to gorging myself in the boneyard, hoping that she might possible meet me halfway, or just beyond, one night, if only for an instant--step back into her own bare feet, onto the wet grass or fallen leaves or snowy ground of the living Enon, so that we could share just one last human word." 

I know from experience the many ways in which grief manifests itself. I particularly remember an acquaintance whose husband died abruptly leaving her with four children. She locked herself in her bedroom for about six weeks during which time her children were left in the care of the oldest daughter. When my husband died not too long after that, I had learned enough from my acquaintance's experience that I remained fully present for my children, most likely at the expense of my own grief. Additionally, it is obvious that the grief of losing a child is far worse than the grief of losing a spouse, a sibling, or a parent. The grief envelopes Charlie because he has no one else. He is utterly alone. 

No one knows how they will respond to profound grief. We comfort ourselves by saying, "Well, I wouldn't act that way." We try to learn from the experiences of others. And, no two experiences of grief are quite the same. The experience of Charlie's grief in Enon is unique to Charlie, but we learn from him, none the less.

Paul Harding says of his writing: "Basically, what I want to do with my reader is break your heart and blow your mind." Enon is not for the faint of heart. It steals your soul. 

Working It Out by Abby Rike is a memoir of grief after losing her husband and two children in a automobile accident. I am intrigued by the premise of the new book The Returned by Jason Mott which explores what happens when dead loved ones actually do return to their families. It's on my Kindle but I haven't read it yet.

 

A brief article Harding wrote about the writing of Enon in the Boston Globe: http://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2013/08/24/author-paul-harding-his-follow-tinkers/WCY3CQ7ucDjM7IPEpRPvYN/story.html

A good review in the Minneapolis Star Tribune: http://www.startribune.com/entertainment/books/222582481.html

Saturday Night Widows

by Becky Aikman

Crown, 2013

337 pages     Memoir

Six women embark on a journey of discovery that ends with a trip to the exotic land of Morocco. They toast their journey, "To our dead husbands. We wouldn't be here if they hadn't died."

Becky Aikman, a New York newspaper reporter, was widowed in her forties when her husband Bernie died of cancer. Casting around for a way to deal with the overwhelming grief, she joined a traditional support group for widows only to find that the group was bringing her emotionally down even further. There had to be something better, she thought. She set out to study the human response to losing a partner and report about it. Her memoir, Saturday Night Widows, is the result of the journey.

Eventually, she formed a group of six widows in their 30s through 50s who met on Saturday nights once a month for a year to support each other. She really had no expectations for the group at first, because everyone seemed so different--the only thing they had in common was their widowhood. Rather quickly, they gained confidence in each other and supported each other as they moved beyond grief to joyful new lives. Interspersed throughout the narrative of the group process is Aikman's own story, of her beloved husband's slow death from cancer. The author briefly tells the stories of each of the other women, although we don't come to know them quite as well. By the time Aikman wrote Saturday Night Widows, she had happily remarried and as the book closes, she gives a summary of how the lives of each of the women had evolved. 

Although we get a good look at the kind of pain that comes from losing a partner, the book is a marvelous affirmation that there can be joy after loss, happiness after devastation, growth and renewal. Aiken shows that there is a natural inclination of people to trust each other and support each other. Each of these women was interested in moving forward with her life, and that made all the difference.  She says, "I hadn't been looking for a bunch of docile widows, and I certainly didn't get them...they were beginning to flourish, rediscovering themselves." 

Of course, I couldn't help but insert my own story into Saturday Night Widows. I wished that I had found such a great group of friends when I was a young widow. When Lee died, we were both 41 years old and we had three children--15, 11, and 2. It had been a very long illness, so much of my grieving happened before he died. At one point, I had the very clear realization that the children and I were going to be alright, no matter what happened.  After Lee died, I had very little time for grief; I had to create a new life for myself and my children quickly. An older woman once told me that even though her husband had died 20-years before and she had remarried, occasionally she would be overcome with grief. 

I remember telling the story of Lee's illness and death over and over in my mind so that I wouldn't forget it and could tell it to the children if they needed to hear it. When I decided to write the story down a few years ago, all the old grief welled up and I had to quit. I think that now that I have read Becky Aikman's story, I can begin to write about it again.

Despite the subject, Saturday Night Widows is a book most every woman can relate to in their own lives, and the story of women reinventing themselves is a universal one. Very inspiring. The reviewer in the Washington Post says, "The spirit of Saturday Night Widows bursts the stereotype of glum, mournful widowhood with the energy of a pent-up thirst for life. It carries the real sorrow and pain of a terrible human experience, but it also moves relentlessly and joyfully into the current of ongoing adventure."

The Washington Post review: http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-03-29/entertainment/38121952_1_support-group-younger-widows-grief

 You might also be interested in the memoir of Abby Rike, Working It Out. Rike's husband and children were killed in a car accident. The book is the story of her coming back to life.