MAGNIFICENT SORROW

Horsley’s (Between the Legs, 2015) biography/memoir curiously intertwines the lives of two women, separated by half a century.

On April 9, 2000, Horsley’s only child, 19-year-old Aaron Heath Parker-Davis, was walking home from work in Albuquerque, New Mexico, when he was struck and killed by a passing car. It took more than 17 years for the author to bury his ashes in the New Mexico desert. During her years of grieving, she came across pieces of information about a stranger who’d died many decades earlier—Suzette Ryerson Patterson, the daughter of one of Philadelphia’s Main Line high society families. Horsley began seeing unusual similarities between events in her own life and Suzette’s, which led her to contemplate the possibility of cosmic connections. For example, on April 9, 1912—exactly 88 years before Aaron’s death—Suzette and the Ryerson family, vacationing in Paris, received a cable informing them that Suzette’s beloved 19-year-old brother Arthur had died in an automobile accident. The family immediately arranged to return home aboard the first ship available: the RMS Titanic. From a lifeboat, Suzette watched her father go down with the ship on April 14—the same date that Aaron’s memorial service was held, 88 years later. By her own admission, Horsley, a writer and community college teacher, became obsessed with learning everything she could about Suzette’s short but remarkable life, which included years as a volunteer nurse on the front lines during World War I. The author’s dogged research led her to contact the few remaining members of Suzette’s extended family, peruse newspaper articles and letters that the woman wrote to her mother, and gain access to family photos—many of which she reproduces here. The overall result is a poignant and often riveting historical work, interspersed with Horsley’s emotional, first-person account of her painful search for peace in the face of tragedy. In the portions that focus on Suzette’s life, the author also offers vivid accounts of the horror of the Titanic’s sinking, the trauma of the World War I, and, not incidentally, the extravagant lifestyles of the wealthy elite.

An engaging, passionate book that leaves some lingering metaphysical questions unanswered.