I learned to knit in 2002, six months after my 5-year-old daughter, Grace, died suddenly from a virulent form of strep. I was unable to read or write, and friends suggested I take up knitting; almost immediately I fell under its spell.
All that was missing... was everything else.
If you want to feel like ginger ale Claire, drink a ginger ale.
I have learned that there is more power in a good strong hug than in a thousand meaningful words.
I was kind of an outsider growing up, and I preferred reading to being with other kids. When I was about seven, I started to write my own books. I never thought of myself as wanting to be a writer-I just was one.
No one can write like Cheryl Strayed.
A sibling is the lens through which you see your childhood.
Even now, there are still days so beautiful, I almost believe in God.
When I was seven years old, I fell in love with a series published by Bobbs-Merrill called ‘The Childhood of Famous Americans.’ In it, historical figures like Clara Barton, Nancy Hanks, Elias Howe, Patrick Henry, and dozens more came to life for me as children.
In Orphan Train, Christina Baker Kline seamlessly knits together the past and present of two women, one young and one old. Kline reminds us that we never really lose anyone or anything or – perhaps most importantly – ourselves.
Time doesn’t heal, I had learned, it just keeps moving. And it takes us with it.
Grief doesn’t have a plot. It isn’t smooth. There is no beginning and middle and end.
Don’t waste your one beautiful life.
No mother should lose her child.
The only language she could speak was grief. How could he not know that? Instead, she said, “I love you.” She did. She loved him. But even that didn’t feel like anything anymore.
In my adult life, I had spent a lot of time angry at God, mostly over the sudden deaths in my family – my brother at 30, my daughter at 5.