There are some essays that demand to be read. Among those essays are the rare few that must be reread. These are essays that are so wrenching you want to take the writer’s hand and hold it as she maps out her route through the pain of memory. Ann Hood, a fine novelist and essayist, recently published a masterpiece in the literature of grief on Salon.com. The piece was entitled: “What I Never Told Anyone About Her Death.” The subtitle elaborates: “Years After I Lost my Daughter, I’m Haunted by What Happened – and What I Couldn’t Do.”

Hood’s nightmare began when 5-year-old Grace collapsed in ballet class with a broken arm. Twenty-four hours later Grace was dead from a virulent strain of strep. That was nine years ago, and Hood eventually articulated the unimaginable in a compact, powerful memoir called “Comfort: A Journey Through Grief.” The book, as well as the recent Salon essay, shares the ineffable quality of sacred literature. Nothing is extraneous on the page. There is just Hood knitting her grief and sorrow into an extended Mourner’s Kaddish.


Ann Hood, author of “What I Never Told Anyone About Her Death.”
Almost a decade after Grace’s death, Hood wrote the essay to confront the fact that moments after Grace’s death, she could not touch her daughter’s lifeless body. “Grace lay on that gurney. I looked at her, my daughter. I knew I should hold her. I knew I should take her into my arms. But I couldn’t. In the nine years since Grace died, with all the pages and pages I have written about losing her, I have never written these words.”

In “Comfort,” I learn about seemingly small yet devastating gestures such as Hood cherishing Grace’s small wire-rimmed glasses. All I can think of is Adam at 10 months, his own pair of glasses sitting askew on his face. Is recalling Adam’s first pair of glasses an act of empathy? Yes and no. We burrow through layers of theology, mourning and all-out grief to arrive at the same chilling conclusion: There but for the grace of G-d go my family and I. And then the irrational creeps in. Can prayers of gratitude for the beautiful children that fill our lives draw too much attention?

“Your daughter is not going to make it,” a doctor tells Hood a few hours after Grace was rushed to the emergency room with a 105-degree temperature. Who talks to a mother about her child that way? But Grace has strep, Hood thinks, and antibiotics stamp out this kind of thing. Grace would live. And for a flickering light-filled moment, Grace’s blue eyes out-dazzled the steel and chrome of the hospital’s ICU room. For another brief time, her gray skin went pink and hopeful. Grace was going to live. What kind of clinician says, within earshot of Hood, to note on Grace’s chart that her mother is hysterical?

In “Comfort,” Hood, born Catholic and a parishioner at a Protestant church, writes directly, simply and movingly about her wavering faith – her unabated anger:

“The life I had so carefully nurtured for a decade came to a grinding, confusing halt. Who does a mother turn to for blame and hate at a time like this? G-d, of course. For all the uncountable moments over these past ten years when I had paused to thank G-d, now I turned on Him.”

Yet the G-d of the Mourner’s Kaddish demands a mourner’s unconditional love at a time when she is most angry. “Hallowed and extolled, lauded and exalted, Honored and revered, adored and worshipped.” I don’t know, G-d forbid, if I could say those words in the ancient Aramaic of the Kaddish for a child of mine.

The Kaddish requires the mourner to be part of a daily minyan – a group of 10 adults in order to say the prayer. Hood crawled into bed and drew the covers over her head. She cried. When I was a teenager, I heard a family friend who lost her child in a car accident whisper, “I had no idea the body could produce this many tears.”

The same day that I read Hood’s essay, I recalled seeing an email that she was reading from her new novel at Newtonville Books that evening. I suddenly remembered this at 6:36 p.m.; the reading was at 7 p.m. The rice was cooking. I handed Ken the spoon I was stirring with and said, “I have to meet a writer who wrote a magnificent Kaddish to her daughter.”

My eyes welled up as soon as I recognized Ann Hood. She knew without me saying a word that I had read her piece in Salon. I told her that I had never read anything quite as moving as her essay. I shook her hand. She drew me in for a hug. We cried as if Grace had just died.