I had a loss this summer, and I’ve been thinking about grief. How when a loss comes (even though you knew it was coming), the emotions don’t always show themselves the way you’ve imagined they will, how everyone grieves in her own idiosyncratic way, and how shared grief can drive us all apart instead of bringing us closer.
All this has put me in mind of Beth Greenfield’s memoir, Ten Minutes from Home, which I read (and loved) in the spring when it was published. It’s the story of what happened the year the author was 12, when a car her father was driving was struck by a drunk driver, killing her little brother Adam and her best friend Kristin.
It’s such a clear-eyed, heartfelt-but-never-maudlin account of that cataclysmic event and the time that came after, as she and her mother and father raggedly try, and fail, to find comfort. But it’s a hopeful book too, full of grace, as the writer heals by circling back to tell the tale.
If grief is lonely and raw, then so is adolescence, and in this book the two come together in such a heartbreaking way. Like Beth, I came of age in the eighties, and the memory for detail here is so rich that I could have been back there again. At one point she longs to escape the intensity of the sadness by using the superhuman powers of Jamie Sommers in The Bionic Woman. Me too, Beth! Me too.
