The author and her husband had two sons, and both died by suicide: the first at sixteen, the second six years later at nineteen. This book is dedicated to their younger son, James. It is a profound reflection on grief and the endless mourning that follows the loss of a child. The author writes about what it means to become a parent without children, a state for which, unlike \u201corphan\u201d or \u201cwidow,\u201d no word even exists. She also explores how to continue living with such an unbearable absence lodged permanently in the heart, questioning whether life itself still has meaning. There are no adequate words to describe what happened to this woman, to this couple, and no comforting phrase can truly ease such pain. She says she is living in an abyss, and even as a reader, I can hardly begin to imagine its depth. Heartbreaking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAnd this, among other reasons, is why I am against the word “grief,” which in contemporary culture seems to indicate a process that has an end point: the sooner you get there, the sooner you prove yourself to be a good sport at living, and the less awkward people around you will feel. Sometimes people ask me where I am in the grieving process, and I wonder whether they understand anything at all about losing someone. How lonely the dead would feel, if the living were to stand up from death’s shadow, clap their hands, dust their pants, and say to themselves and to the world, I am done with my grieving; from this point on it’s life as usual, business as usual.<\/em> The author and her husband had two sons, and both died by suicide: the first at sixteen, the second six years later at nineteen. This book is dedicated to their younger son, James. It is a profound reflection on grief and the endless mourning that follows the loss of a child. The author writes about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21741,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[291,293],"tags":[305,82,124],"class_list":["post-21740","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books-2026","category-challenge-riquiqui-2026","tag-children","tag-grief","tag-loss"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/luca-iaconelli-6lupQ3-UfI4-unsplash-scaled.jpg?fit=1696%2C2560&ssl=1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21740","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21740"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21740\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21794,"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21740\/revisions\/21794"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21741"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21740"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21740"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
I don’t want an end point to my sorrow. The death of a child is not a heat wave or a snowstorm, nor an obstacle race to rush through and win, nor an acute or chronic illness to recover from. What is grief but a word, a shortcut, a simplification of something much larger than that word?<\/em>
Thinking about my children is like air, like time. Thinking about them will only end when I reach the end of my life.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"