I read a review in People Mag about this book called ‘Comfort’ by Ann Hood. I went to B&N and bought it… read the whole thing in one night.
I couldn’t have identified more with it. I don’t know how I really even explain it - it’s a true story about a woman whose daughter dies, and the trauma of having to live life without her. I loved it.
It is a book that you can only read once, much like ‘Boys Don’t Cry’. So I am going to give it to a friend.
here is the description:
A moving and remarkable memoir about the sudden death of a daughter, surviving grief, and learning to love again.
A review sums it up best.
On April 18, 2002, Grace Annabelle Adrain — five-and-a-half-year-old daughter of business executive Lorne Adrain and novelist Ann Hood, and sister of nine-year-old Sam — died in Providence, Rhode Island, of a rare form of strep that brought about massive organ failure less than two days after she fell ill. Those are the sterile facts reported in Grace’s obituary. COMFORT is Hood’s searing portrayal of the struggle she and her family endured to deal with a loss so grievous it defies our understanding.
Through Hood’s loving portrait we come to know Grace, a bright and cheerful little girl who wore glasses, could count to 10 in flawless Chinese, loved to dance, paint and listen to the Beatles. Whose favorite meal was sliced cucumbers and shell pasta with butter and parmesan cheese. Whose hair was often tangled, who hid candy in the recesses of her drawers and who responded to her mother’s sometimes exasperated urging to get moving in the morning with the protest, “You can’t hurry an artist, guys.”
In a prologue, Hood grimly trots out all of the clichés family and friends offered to assuage her grief: She is in a better place; time heals; you should walk every day. And finally, the piece of advice most disturbing to a writer who finds herself incapable of writing: Are you writing anything down? In the face of these attempts at consolation, much of it perhaps unintentionally intended to assuage the helpless feelings of people offering it, Hood weeps, rages, burns with jealousy when she sees a healthy young child, even has her ankle tattooed on what would have been Grace’s sixth birthday. “Grief isn’t something you get over,” she concludes. “You live with it. You go on with it lodged in you. Sometimes I feel like I have swallowed a pile of stones.”
Not a religious person herself, Hood reluctantly tries to gain solace from various faiths, none of which offer the answers she craves: “It wasn’t pity I wanted, or even sympathy. I wanted Grace back. And short of that, I wanted God or someone to help me understand why she was gone and what to do without her.” In the end, religion having failed her, she writes, “Knitting saved my life.”
“Grief is not linear,” Hood observes. “It is disjointed.” Reading her account brings to mind the image of someone stumbling through a thick forest, illuminated occasionally by a shaft of sunlight that quickly disappears, leaving blackness behind. And to the notion that “time heals,” she replies: “Time doesn’t heal, I had learned, it just keeps moving. And it takes us with it.”
By the time we feel as if we know Grace and her family, it’s impossible to choke back the lump forming in our throat or the tears springing to our eyes as we read. This short book is laced with countless overwhelming moments, often growing out of the most mundane elements of daily life, elevated in their significance by Hood’s recounting of them in prose that reveals a novelist’s observant eye and bares a mother’s broken heart.
Years after Grace’s death, four pairs of her shoes still sit at the top of the stairs, “lined up, toes pointed out, ready to be put on, ready to skip down those stairs, out the door, into the world.” And when, on an “ordinary Saturday in February” three years after Grace’s death, Hood finally summons up the courage to clean out her daughter’s room, fingering bits of clothing that conjure memories and the ache of memories that never will be, her description is nothing short of devastating.
To leaven the bleakness of this review, it’s tempting to reveal the event that occurs at the end of COMFORT that, in some sense, brings Hood’s story full circle. Instead, it seems more appropriate to leave that as a form of consolation to be discovered by the readers who have accompanied Hood on her difficult journey.
Well-meaning people moved by the hard-earned insights of this profoundly wise memoir may be inspired, as did Hood’s friends when they thrust similar books into her hands, to offer it to their own loved ones who have suffered a loss like Hood’s, perhaps not as tragic but a loss nonetheless. Without disparaging the kindheartedness of this impulse, it is one that Hood’s story counsels us to question. Because the inescapable truth that emerges from this shattering book is that while loss is universal, grief is singular.
