W.W. Norton & Co., May 2008
After losing her five-year-old daughter, Grace, to a virulent form of strep throat, Ann Hood writes, “In the days and weeks and months that followed, I told these details over and over to anyone who would listen. Repeating them made the story, which seemed unbelievable still, real.”
Comfort: A Journey Through Grief is a slim, poetic, harrowing, affirming volume. In it, Hood explains, “Grief is not linear.” She makes the story real to the reader, as she did to herself, by repeating the details. She repeats and searches for ways to cope, which includes learning to knit. “I made a mess of it,” Hood writes of her first scarf, “randomly adding stitches, dropping stitches, then adding even more. When I showed up with this tangle of wool, Jen pulled it off the needle and all my mistakes were miraculously gone. I could start anew. Unlike life, or at least this new life of mine—in which I was forced to keep moving forward through the mess it had become—knitting allowed me to start over and over again, until whatever I was making looked exactly as I wanted it to look.”
As I read this pitch-perfect book, early in 2008, I held my infant daughter, Saskia. I fed her bottles, burped her, and watched her sleep. We were in the process of adopting Saskia, whom we’d been with since birth and taken home after two days. Though we’d never met or heard from Saskia’s birth father, he opposed the adoption. As I read about Hood’s terrible loss, I feared our own. If this man prevailed, we could lose a child whom we loved, whose life with us felt absolutely right. Even the thought of losing her, pressing so close, stopped me from breathing. Hood writes, “At night I would wake up in pain, my arms actually hurting with longing for her. It is hard to imagine that emptiness can cause pain, but my empty arms ached.” I got it; my arms ached with the fear of emptiness. How, I wondered, would I press on, if the worst came to pass?
I wrote about our experience, as I write now about Saskia, who is now legally adopted. I realize one must tell the story again and again to actually believe it.
Hood now has a son nearly twelve years old. “Sam was opening his own arms wide, ready to hold whatever came his way,” Hood writes about him. “That is what we all do, I suppose. We open our arms wide. We hold on. We hold on tight.”
Yes, we hold on tight.
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Sarah Werthan Buttenwieser is a freelance writer whose work appears in The Maternal is Political (Seal Press), Fourth Genre, Literary Mama, and the Southwest Review. She has a MFA from Warren Wilson College’s Program for Writers. Buttenwieser has her own blog, Standing in the Shadows.