The Unique Hell of Grief

In her powerful and unsparing memoir about losing her daughter, Danielle Crittenden tells the truth about grief — and finds, on the other side, a reason to go on

Of all the emotional experiences that will upend your life, grief sits in a category of its own. And within the species of grief itself, there is a hierarchy that the world seems to recognize instinctively: that no loss is more unnatural, more devastating or more life-altering than the death of a child.

Danielle Crittenden has just released her powerful cri de coeur, “Dispatches from Grief: A Mother’s Journey Through the Unthinkable” about the loss of her daughter Miranda. In this compact and unsparing masterpiece of the grief genre, Crittenden begs us to cease with the platitudes, forced hopefulness and spiritual bypassing that the grieving are so often assaulted with, and just face the facts: grief really, really sucks.

There is the shock and unreality of learning your beloved and effervescent 32-year-old daughter was found dead on the floor of her Brooklyn apartment with her devoted rascal of a dog, Ringo, curled up next to her.

While Miranda had suffered the health consequences from a previously removed tumor, she and her parents had been led to believe she would go on to live a healthy life despite having her pituitary gland removed. While this could be managed with medication, not getting it perfectly dosed could lead to a compromised autoimmune system that ultimately took her life.

Now, Miranda’s parents’ lives are cleaved into two halves: the Before and the After. They have been transported to what Crittenden calls the “Alternate Universe,” a place populated by parents at different stages of a grief that never truly abates.

My first encounter with grief occurred when my father, only 61, dropped dead of a heart attack. I was only 35 and surrounded by friends who still had healthy and alive parents—even if those parents could annoy them endlessly—while I had moved into the club of People With One Dead Parent.

Even though Crittenden’s story retraces the unique and unending hell of losing a child, so much of what she writes lands with precision for those who have lived through the aftermath of a trauma or death of a loved one.

She writes:

There was no trajectory to my grief. Grief is a shapeshifter. When it abates, it still lurks. [My husband] David likened it to an open computer program running perpetually in the background, draining memory, sapping power.

I’ve often struggled for the words to describe how grief uniquely upended and reordered my life, assaulting me with a physical pain I thought might literally kill me. Just as I felt I had gained some ground in the daily battle to fight off the darkness that would engulf me as I awakened each morning, it would be revisited upon me with double its previous force.

Crittenden finds the words.

Each morning, I feel like a soldier waking up to mud and terror. My sense of mission and purpose is drained. How bad will the assaults be today? How can I keep summoning the strength to continue the bleak march onward? I’m answered by the words of Samuel Beckett: “You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”

How I could have used this book at earlier phases of my life, if only to understand the universality of what I was feeling. That is the gift that Crittenden shares by excavating her deepest pain and telling the truth about what grief actually feels and looks like.

She explains what is helpful to the grieving: a squeeze of the hand or sharing stories about the person who is no longer among us. Don’t ask the grieving what you can do; just do it. Send them a gift, make them a meal, but don’t ask them to think. Their brains are a jumble of confusion, still trying to make sense of the senseless. They are in shock.

Crittenden speaks for all the grieving, I think, when she admonishes those who insisted to her that grief was a “gift.”

She writes:

Believe it or not, there is no shortage of people who believe that the worst thing that can happen to you is actually an opportunity for growth. [N]one, I’d wager, have been flattened by real catastrophe. They use words like “brave” to describe quitting a dull job.

This heartbroken, shattered mother has special ire for an often shared Rumi poem that asserts, “Sorrow prepares you for joy.”

“To which, I know Miranda would join me in saying, ‘Fuck off,’” Crittenden goes on. “Miranda’s death is not my spiritual gain. I was happier with my child than without her. Nothing better will grow in her place. My ‘truth’ is that my daughter is dead.”

Intermingled with Crittenden’s “real talk” on grief are stories about her tight-knit family, and Miranda’s unique role in that unit as a dynamic force and lover of life and her people. The reader also experiences the profound and eternal love of a mother. While this is a book about grief and unimaginable loss, it’s also a love letter from a mother to her daughter about their special bond.

Eventually, Crittenden has a revelation as she counsels a new member of what she deems the “Land of the Grief”—a mother who lost a 32-year-old son to cancer. The mother shares that she has to remember her son’s life was a gift, then adds, “And also that my life is a gift.”

This is something Crittenden can work with. None of the “happiness hucksterism” which she finds so gross, but “a new way to calibrate,” she writes. “I need to embrace my own gift of life to move forward.”

“Perhaps this is what ‘getting through’ grief actually means. Not returning to who you were—that person is gone,” Crittenden writes. “But learning how to live again, and more crucially, why. The chrysalis isn’t a resting place but a vessel for transformation. What emerges may bear little resemblance to what entered. Cliche perhaps…yet it nudges my feet in the right direction.”