![]() Obviously, those who have never had a child, those who have lost a child, those who have never lost anyone or known grief, will feel different emotional tugs. Finally, in more recent days, I've come to understand the power of ritual as a cleansing and healing force that can be understood rationally but only truly comprehended and experienced as a matter of temporality and participation. I have also learned that grief, not properly expressed, can either eat at a person or else detach them from their emotions. Both of my parents are dead-one passed away when I was thirteen and the other when I was an adult-and so I am acquainted with grief, loss, and mourning. I have a daughter just a little older than Rosalie Lightning would have been now had she lived, and so she was in my mind's eye as I read the book. ![]() There are a number of other factors that also informed my reading. There is no denying that my own personal and professional relationship with Tom informed my experience of reading the book. In the case of Tom Hart and his shattering but ultimately hopeful memoir, Rosalie Lightning, the events immediately following the death of his toddler daughter are painfully private, yet his ability to relate them in an honest and even poetic manner creates a powerful aesthetic and emotional space. Writing about the most intimate specifics of personal experience is paradoxically that which makes that experience so relatable to others. ![]()
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