Whew. This was a tough one. Elizabeth McCracken chronicles the loss of her stillborn child and the year that followed. The book is positively heartwrenching and brutally honest. It will touch a chord in just about anyone. McCracken takes the reader through the happy days leading up to the tragic birth of her first child as well as the gamut of emotions she went through following his loss. The reader is left with a greater understanding and sympathy for mothers who have gone through the loss of a child through miscarriage or stillbirth and the unique challenges of the grief associated with these losses.
My grandmother lost her first child at birth. My mother's older brother would have been 66 this year. I have visited his grave and wondered what he would have been like. This book brought those events to the forefront of my mind and made me wonder what it was like for my grandparents to go through such a loss.
BOTTOM LINE: Highly recommended. This book will join such classics of grief and loss as CS Lewis' A GRIEF OBSERVED and Joan Didion's YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING and offers insight into a very specific type of loss that seldom gets addressed.
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