‘Weep. Scream. Hate. Disbelieve. Go numb. Breathe.’ Hard-earned lessons about loss and grief

The loss of a child may be a parent’s worst nightmare. One can imagine that the grief it entails might be unbearable. Two books published this year by Seattle authors offer gentle advice for anyone grieving a debilitating loss. Both are by mothers who lost sons, and both of the authors seek to fill an empty space they found in their experience of grief.

Paula Becker’s A Little Book of Self-Care for Those Who Grieve offers solace in few words. That was something Becker found lacking as she struggled to endure the overwhelming grief she experienced from the death her son Hunter in 2017. The book “offers grievers a quiet touchstone of care and advice that can be returned to again and again.”

Author and journalist Carol Smith lost her son Christopher many years ago, when he was seven years old. She also struggled to find ways to survive that loss. Her memoir about that journey is Crossing the River: Seven Stories That Saved My Life. In writing it, she hoped to give others a sense of a roadmap to how grief might touch and shape their lives over time.

Paula Becker is a writer and historian. Her works include Looking for Betty MacDonald, and the memoir A House on Stilts: Mothering in the Age of Opioid Addiction. Carol Smith is an award-winning journalist and an editor at KUOW. The Elliott Bay Book Company presented this conversation between Paula Becker and Carol Smith on September 8, 2021. Elliott Bay’s Rick Simonson introduced the program.

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