Customer Reviews

Comfort: A Journey Through Grief

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"Comfort" is a very great book.

I don't think most people would read it if I paid them.

Consider: In April of 2002, Ann Hood's 5-year-old daughter spiked a fever. Rushed to the hospital, Grace was diagnosed with the kind of strep that ravages internal organs. In less than 48 hours, this sparkling, smart, cute, funny, loving girl --- a kid who embodied the entire glossary of childhood wonderfulness --- was dead.

You often hear: "There's nothing worse than burying a child."

Reading about it when the author is a master isn't much better.

Hood sugarcoats nothing. The book --- a love letter to a child forever missing --- starts with a chapter of all the things people tell grieving parents. Time heals. Give away her clothes, clean out her room. Take this drug. Have you read this? You look better.

And, because Hood had published some novels: Are you writing this down?

She does. Here. Finally. And, at the start, literally: Only the lies people tell me. There are no words for the size of this grief.

And the greatest of these lies? Time heals.

But Ann Hood doesn't heal. That's the plot of this 180-page memoir. Oh, she bought a journal, but she couldn't write, couldn't read, couldn't focus, couldn't cook, couldn't couldn't couldn't. If she didn't have a husband and a son, she might have drowned in a pool of tears.

And then there is the problem of time. Grace was so alive, she died so fast, where did she go? In memory, more real than the present, she's right here. But to step into her room, to drive past her school, to hear one of her favorite songs by The Beatles --- here come those tears again.

Someone pushes Hood to take up knitting. Well, why not? She fills a small room with yarn. And then: "I picked up my knitting needles. I cast on, counting my stitches. Then I swam, Gracie. I tried to swim to the other side of grief."

Does she make it? Well, she cooks pasta --- the shells that Gracie had loved --- and "the food did bring us comfort." There are desperate, hot, clinging nights with her husband. There is --- no surprise --- a frantic effort to get an explanation from a god who seems heartbreakingly silent. There's the graveside scene that is mercifully just a paragraph. And, though she doesn't say it here, she writes a novel, "The Knitting Circle", about a woman whose only child dies.

And then....but I don't want to spoil the ending. [If you must know, a Very Good Thing happens.] Everything changes. And then, some days, it's back to square one. "Grief doesn't have a plot," Hood writes. "It isn't smooth. There is no beginning and middle and end."

This is not an easy book to get through, and when you have, as we do, a 6-year-old girl in the next room, it's even worse. But I'm damn glad I read "Comfort". It's real and unadorned --- Ann Hood puts you in the room. This is great writing precisely because this isn't Writing, just a record of constant horror, occasional relief, and the power of time.

But enduring a book like this just for the writing --- that's for the hard-core reader. A more likely reason is that you're grieving, and you want to compare notes. Or that you're a parent, and this is your worst fear, and you can't resist finding out how grim it might be to lose a child.

As it happened, I read this book a day after our kid revealed that she was not quite the perfect goddess we had led ourselves to believe. I suspect there are a lot of parents who experience that daily. They're not disappointed with their kids, not really; they're just frazzled, beat up in their own lives, with no way to talk back to the perpetrators. And so they snap. Or get loud. Or tune out. Well, "Comfort" reminded me that we were blessed our daughter showed up here at all.

I would bet that a tear-stained hour with "Comfort" will keep any parent straight for months.

The courage it took for author Ann Hood to put into words a wordless grief merits more than five stars. But the fact that Ms. Hood has accomplished this with complete honesty and unalterable love, using the skilled craft she has so beautifully mastered makes this little book a giant. To lose a child is the worst sorrow a parent can know, particularly when that loss is sudden. What the author does is guide the reader through her process - from the numbing shock and its devastating aftermath, how it affects her as a mother, what it means to her family, to her sense of spirituality, to her marriage, to her every day life as she knew it then and knows it now, and the reaction from friends and complete strangers. This book is a tribute to a special little girl who loved the Beatles, cucumber slices, art, and dancing. It serves as a gift to those who might have staggered under the unbearable and lonely journey through intense sorrow. Hood's honesty with her reader keeps this book on track. She offers no solutions, but she does offer hope. And she offers her readers comfort in the passage of time, in the love and support of family and friends, and a way to move forward into a different framework that contains light and love, while holding on to the memory of someone beloved. This is an incredible book. I wish Ann Hood and her family all of the best and I thank her for the heart it took to weave this book together.

Ann Hood has experienced the worst grief of all - the death of a child. Hood first shared her story of loss and redemption through her best selling novel, The Knitting Circle. Comfort - A Journey Through Grief is the true story of how Hood has mourned the death of her five year old daughter, Grace. It is a book to share with someone who needs consolation in the time of death.

Hood's memoir of her journey through grief following her daughter's sudden death is exquisitely written. Her writing screams with anguish and rage, pleads and begs for understanding, and totally captivates. As a bereaved grandmother, I connected with every word, every emotion, every response. She details the drive to make sense of what happened, from both a medical point of view as well as a spiritual one. The contradictory desire of the bereaved to both withdraw and reach out is eloquently described. Even the size of the book is appropriate- a small, compact book which fits easily into hands aching to hold a child.

This book would be a wonderful gift for a grieving family. I also recommend it to those who truly care and are trying to comprehend the grief a bereaved friend feels. Hood's pain is so palpable at times that it seems to leap off the page, yet the book shimmers with love, hope and ultimately, comfort.

Ann Hood's memoir is a brave, honest, heartbreaking account of her daughter's death, and the family's never-ending aftermath of grief. Of course it's difficult to read about a mother's worst nightmare, but what comes through the most in this book is the human spirit's ability to go on. No, time does not heal, a grieving mother will not ever heal, will not ever stop missing her child. But, as Ann shows us, life continues to evolve, and eventually we are there to discover it's wonders again.

The author's five year old daughter Grace died suddenly. She writes about her life and her coping with her grief. While the subject matter may turn many away, this 186 page book, which can be read in one sitting, will move you and particularly so if you have children.

Many compare this book to Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. From my point of view, this book is in a different class - far superior - coming deep from the author's soul where you live and feel the grief as you turn the pages. For example (P. 96): "I have read that when someone loses an arm or leg, for months afterward they still feel the pain in their missing limb. A phantom limb, it is called, as if the outline or shadow of that limb is still there. That is what my arm became. Phantom limbs, aching for Grace. 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 arched."

The book is beautifully written. The author has a knack of bringing alive small every day experiences - "I ate wine biscuits twisted into pretzel shapes and hard bread dipped into tomato sauce, tight batons of prosciutto and crunchy stalks of fennel dripping with olive oil."

Hood is direct in explaining her grief - there is no magic silver bullet to deal it.

"Writing about Grace, losing her, loving her, anything at all is not linear. Readers wants a writer to be able to connect the dots. But these dots don't connect. One day I think about how knitting saved my life, and I write about that. But how do I connect it to other parts of my grief? Grief doesn't have a plot. It isn't smooth. There is no beginning and middle and end."

Or

"It had been three years since Grace had died. Slowly, we were back to work, out with friends again. Our loss still filled our home, every corner of it. It still filled us. Time doesn't heal, I had learned, it just keeps moving. And it takes us with it."

And finally, she expresses her anguish in vivid heartbreaking ways:

"The first time I walked into Grace's room after she died, when the reality of what had happened to us in the past forty-eight hours was still unbelievable, the first things I saw were those tights. I saw them and screamed, not the kind of scream that comes from fright, but the kind that comes from the deepest grief imaginable. It is a scream that comes when there are no words to express what you feel. It is an argument with God or life or death. It is a scream that rails against logic and fate and everything there is."

Hood eventually turns the corner but never shakes the horror and pain of losing a loved one. Hood's grief comes alive and is real as you turn the pages. Sad but emotionally stirring book.

This may be the saddest and most uplifting book you will read this year.

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.

--- Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg

I was already a big fan of Ann Hood's, but after reading her nearly autobiographical novel, The Knitting Circle, I really wanted to know how she is working through the tragedy of the death of her young daughter. Comfort was a heartwrenching read, exploring honestly the vast dimensions of pain and loss an untimely death brings. It is a gift to all those who haven't yet or cannot put into words the grief they may have experienced. For the rest of us, it is both a reminder to treasure every day with our loved ones and a lesson in how we might approach those who are grieving with tenderness and courage.

I have no children, but I thought I could imagine the pain of losing one. No way. Not even close. Hood, one of my favorite writers, so deftly draws us into her pain that we forget that Grace is not ours. Bravo.
Martha Frankel Hats & Eyeglasses: A Family Love Affair with Gambling

How can one recommend a book that is so sad? Many people would shy away from reading a book about the death of a child. But by not reading Hood's journey through grief, one would miss so much.

Hood's journey, like that of every parent who has lost a child, will never end. It will just get less raw, although at times it will still overwhelm. I do not think I have ever read anything more heartfelt, more eloquent, more full of what a parent goes through when the worst has happened.

Hood's voice is so real and so compelling. I read this book in one sitting, until 2 AM, and was so worn out when I finished. Not because it was 2 AM but because of the emotion I had experienced. I wished that I was able to reach out an hold this grieving family in my arms and make it better. But it will never get better for them.