SANCTUARY

A meticulous examination of the aftershocks of the loss of a child.

Rapp Black begins with a stirring scene: Devastated by her son’s terminal illness and failing marriage, she recounts how she stood on a bridge in New Mexico, contemplating throwing herself nearly 600 feet into the river below. Though she walked away, she was far from mental or emotional recovery. In her previous memoir, The Still Point of the Turning World, the author tracked her experience during the period after she realized that her son, Ronan, had Tay-Sachs disease, a debilitating genetic disorder that progressively destroys the nervous system. In this follow-up, she describes in wrenching detail his death in 2013, shortly before his third birthday, and her response to that tragedy as well as the painful, “cruel” dissolution of her marriage. Rapp Black soon remarried and had a daughter, Charlie, a year after Ronan's death. The aching conflict she continues to feel about being mother to both a dead child and a living one is central to the story, as is her attempt to refute the many ways her friends and others tried to praise and reassure her for her “resilience” (a word she has “a complicated relationship with”) and on her “second chance” or the “resurrection of your life,” ideas that frustrate her. “Ronan is gone and Charlie is here,” she tells herself, as she tries to adjust to being “not just a bereaved parent, but a bereaved parent with a living child.” Not so much a traditional memoir as a series of essays of varying lengths, the book doesn't follow a straightforward narrative arc, as Rapp Black attempts to understand her feelings and irresolvable conflict from multiple angles. She employs a variety of metaphors—dark matter in one chapter, butterflies in another—which may leave some readers impatient even as they clearly delineate her abiding mental state.

A searing, uncompromising effort to wrestle with permanent grief.