“I want a book that acknowledges that life goes on but death goes on, too, that a person who is dead is a long, long story.”
—Elizabeth McCracken, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination

People often asked me, “What books do you personally recommend?” My response always begins the same way: “I don’t recommend what I read to 99.9% of people.”  I’m quick to follow up with an explanation—my reading habits are dominated by books about grief and loss. I came by this particular habit honestly. That is to say, I started young.

I read Alex: The Life of a Child by Frank Deford when I was 13-years-old. It’s the story of his daughter Alex who died of cystic fibrosis at the age of 8 not soon after the last Christmas he would ever spend with her. It was one of the first books I placed on Rebel Heart’s shelves. When my husband met Frank Deford at a neurosurgical conference one day in 2011 where Deford talked about loss, he told him that I still have my copy and how much it meant to me. He said Deford looked like he might cry and then inscribed his latest book with the words:

For Eileen-

Keep Writing- and thank you for caring so much about Alex.

I still have my battered copies of Waiting for Johnny Miracle by Alice Bach, Three-Legged Race by Charles P. Crawford, A Summer to Die by Lois Lowry, The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton and Tiger Eyes by Judy Blume and many more. I can’t say exactly when or why my reading veered into the abyss. Perhaps it was because my mother was hospitalized during critical periods of my life. Maybe I was reading to prepare myself for her possible death. Or maybe I knew something had already been lost between us. Something I could never get back.

From the very beginning, we’ve had a Grief & Loss section in the store. More than a few people have noticed that this section is always well-stocked. And more than a few people, after hearing my response to their recommendation question, let the masks they wear in their daily lives fall and share stories of loss so profound that I hardly know what to say.

A few weeks ago I started listening to Anderson Cooper’s podcast about grief and loss called “All There Is.” In one episode he talked about the sense of terror he felt at the age of 10 as he opened Christmas presents while his father lay in a hospital. His father died 11 days later. In the years that followed, he, his mother, and his older brother tried to create new holiday rituals until his brother died by suicide at the age of 23. That October, a few months after his brother’s death, his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, called him and asked, “What do you want to do about the dreaded holidays?” and they both laughed, relieved they could acknowledge what they were both feeling, that they didn’t have to pretend.

I spent many hours in the ER during the holidays when I was a doctor. I witnessed people die on them, had to inform family members near and far, or treated people whose grief was compounded by holidays in which they were confronted with others’ happy, seemingly full lives. Lives where no one was yet missing.

For many of us, the holidays, though they may have moments of joy, are also a reminder of someone who is missing. Years and years ago, I read Elizabeth McCracken’s An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, a memoir about the death of her firstborn son in utero at the very end of her pregnancy and then the birth of her second son, just over a year later. She wrote, “I want a book that acknowledges that life goes on but death goes on, too, that a person who is dead is a long, long story.”

We carry the gone. Tell their stories. Write them down. Because someday a 13-year-old girl reads about Frank Deford’s 8-year-old daughter. Reads about how much she loved to laugh but had to learn to laugh gently, not so hard that it would make her choke. Reads how she sat on his lap and said “Oh, Daddy, wouldn’t this have been great?”  The 13-year-old doesn’t forget. Almost 35 years later, she puts that book on the shelves of her bookstore. His daughter is a long, long story.

Eileen Bobek is a former ER Doctor and now owner of Rebel Heart Books in downtown Jacksonville. This is from her November 2022 newsletter. To subscribe, please contact Eileen at rebelheartbooks157@gmail.com.