THE NIGHT LAKE

A wrenching tragedy haunts a mother's life.

In her first position as a recently ordained priest, Tichenor was living in an Episcopal camp on the shores of Lake Tahoe with her husband, their 2-year-old daughter, and newborn son. One evening, she grew alarmed that her infant was in severe distress and rushed to see an emergency care physician. Assured that the baby was healthy, she returned home; hours later, her son died. In a memoir steeped in raw, often heartbreaking emotion, Tichenor recalls the horrifying event and its aftermath as she tries to draw upon faith and community for understanding and solace. From the first, she was astonished by people’s remarks and maudlin sympathy cards that reiterated “the trite explanation that ‘God needed another angel.’ ” Some parishioners, she noticed, “seemed to weirdly want me to take care of them, or who wanted to make it all seem all right, palatable, survivable, understandable, done.” She was exhausted, she writes, by the effort “to avoid the next sympathy attack.” Compounding her grief over her son’s death was the recent suicide of her mother, an alcoholic whose drinking, neglect, and erratic behavior had blighted Tichenor’s childhood. Her mother’s alcoholism, she writes, “was my inheritance, this the dark water I’d been swimming in for years.” Trying to survive those dark waters, Tichenor took up running, sought therapy, and leaned on the strength of a few stalwart friends; for a while, she sought the oblivion of alcohol. “I was angry at all I had been dealt,” she admits. “And I felt so very alone. Drinking didn’t make that go away. But with a drink in my hand, I didn’t have to feel as much.” Now, determinedly sober and a church rector, Tichenor acknowledges the persistence of grief over a death that “gutted me, sank me, its images flashing before my eyes, as I continuously relived it.”

A powerful, forthright chronicle of surviving profound loss.