Media
Interviews & Features
The Senior Zone — Conversation about grief and the absence of a deadline for healing
Mourning Coffee Podcast — Conversation with Brooke Carlock
Soule Kindred Newsletter — Feature in the summer issue
Antioch University — memoir feature
Bedside Reading author spotlight — feature
Baby Boomers — excerpt
Reviews
"Kelly chronicles the sudden death of her adult son—and its piercing aftermath. … The storytelling is deft, engaging, and even bingeworthy … An insightful rendering of devastating loss.”
–Kirkus
“Vulnerable and revealing.”
–Foreword Reviews
“Kelly’s deeply personal memoir offers a haunting portrait of how uncertainty and guilt can distort the experience of grief. When Kelly learns that her 45-year-old son, Michael, has died suddenly, her world tilts on its axis. To her knowledge, Michael wasn't ill and didn't use drugs. The cause of his death remains a mystery for months, suspending the family in a painful state of uncertainty. In that first grief-stricken year, Kelly observes that the experience of losing a child is as isolating as it is devastating. "If you lose a spouse, you are a widow or widower. No further explanation is necessary; one word and it’s understood. But there is no word for those who have lost a child."
Desperate for answers, Kelly searches for clues in vivid dreams, memories of Michael’s childhood, and his remaining possessions, including a sheaf of burned CDs with "labels written in Michael's scratchy handwriting." When she receives the coroner's final diagnosis of heart disease, it helps her accept the sudden loss—but it doesn't ease the guilt she carries. "Finally, I could stop tormenting myself about how long he had suffered… But there was still that question: If I had stopped by … could I have saved him?" Readers will relate to Kelly’s frustration and powerlessness as she grapples with Michael’s fate.
Kelly’s smooth, effortless prose will draw readers along, keeping the tone from becoming morose in the memoir's darker moments. She moves seamlessly between the flat, numb days after learning of Michael's death and warmer, more tender memories of her son as he grows from a sensitive boy to a kindhearted man plagued by depression. In one moving scene, Kelly writes to comedy legend Carol Burnett about watching reruns of her show in the midst of her grief. Burnett, whose daughter died at 38, writes back, noting that she and Kelly “belong to a club we wish didn’t exist.”
–BookLife