Death of a Child

Once More We Saw Stars

Jayson Greene · 2019

Greene’s two-year-old daughter Greta was sitting on a bench with her grandmother when a brick fell from a windowsill above. She died three days later. He began keeping a journal, and this book came out of it. It is the most companionable book on this list, partly because it never argues that what happened was survivable and then proves it anyway. He writes about the first weeks with a kind of stunned precision — the toy bin, the straps on the high chair, the terrible ordinariness of a house that does not know. He also writes about the slow, unlikely return of appetite, of laughter, of a second child. If you are frightened that going on means letting your child go, this is the book that says otherwise, gently and at length.

“There will be more light upon this earth for me.”

Lament for a Son

Nicholas Wolterstorff · 1987

Wolterstorff’s son Eric died at twenty-five in a climbing accident in Austria. The book he wrote is short, and made of fragments — some of them a single sentence long. That structure is the point. It is the only book here you can read when you cannot hold a paragraph in your head. He is a philosopher, and he refuses every comfort his own tradition offers him; he will not say it was meant, he will not say it was for the best, he will not stop asking. Forty years on it remains the book that bereaved parents most often press into each other’s hands, because it does not flinch and it does not explain.

“It is the neverness that is so painful.”

Ordinary People

Judith Guest · 1976

A novel about the year after a family loses its eldest son in a boating accident, told mostly through the younger brother who survived and the father who is trying to hold everyone together. Guest is very good on the thing nobody warns you about: that a family does not grieve as one unit. One person needs to talk about it constantly. Another cannot bear the sound of the name. The distance that opens between two parents who loved the same child is one of the loneliest parts of this, and reading it in a novel, happening to someone else, can make it feel less like a personal failure.

Wave

Sonali Deraniyagala · 2013

Deraniyagala lost her two sons, her husband and both her parents in the 2004 tsunami, in a matter of minutes, on a family holiday in Sri Lanka. The first half of this book is the rawest writing about loss you will find anywhere — she does not perform recovery, she does not spare herself, and for some readers that is precisely what is needed and for others it is far too much. Trust yourself on the timing. What makes it extraordinary is the second half, where she begins, very slowly, to let herself remember her boys as they actually were rather than only as the fact of their absence.

The Snow Child

Eowyn Ivey · 2012

Jack and Mabel come to homestead in 1920s Alaska carrying the silence of a baby who never lived. One evening they build a child out of snow, and in the morning a girl is running through the trees. Ivey never quite tells you whether the child is real, and that ambiguity is the kindest thing about the book. It understands the way a lost child goes on existing — in the corner of a room, in a coat you cannot give away, in the conversations you still have. If plain memoir is too near the bone at the moment, a fairy tale can sometimes carry what nothing else will.

Blue Nights

Joan Didion · 2011

Didion’s daughter Quintana died at thirty-nine, twenty months after Didion’s husband. This is the book she wrote about it, and it circles rather than advances: the same photographs, the same phrases, the same unanswerable questions about what she did or failed to do as a mother. That circling is exactly what grief of this kind is like, and it is oddly steadying to see it on a page. It is also honest about how much of the pain is guilt, which almost every parent carries and almost none of them deserve.

“Memories are what you no longer want to remember.”

Signal Fires

Dani Shapiro · 2022

A novel that opens with a car crash on a summer night in 1985 and then moves back and forth across fifty years to trace what that one evening does to two families living opposite each other. Shapiro is interested in the long after: not the funeral, but the decades, and the way a death nobody can speak about quietly reshapes a marriage, a career, a child’s whole idea of himself. If you are years out and wondering why it still governs everything, this novel takes that seriously rather than treating it as a failure to move on.

The Still Point of the Turning World

Emily Rapp · 2013

Rapp’s son Ronan was diagnosed with Tay-Sachs at nine months old, a disease with no treatment and no survivors. She wrote this while he was still alive, knowing he would not reach three. It is the essential book for any parent whose child died slowly, of an illness, with a diagnosis and a timeline — a particular kind of loss that begins long before the death and is rarely written about with this much clarity. She has no patience for silver linings and says so plainly, which is a relief.