Comfort [Hardcover]

"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.

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