'Still Point': A Meditation On Mothering A Dying Child
On how writing about the experience turned into a book
"I never actually wrote this intending it to be a book. I wrote it as a series of blog posts in most of 2011 — at least January to the end of the summer — in a sort of fugue of grief and hysteria, essentially. I did it because it gave me something to do and I desperately needed that, and I just felt like ... my only lifeline to some kind of hope was putting words on paper, trying to make meaning from chaos and then putting it out in the world. Initially the readers were my friends — my girlfriends, basically. [They] were like, 'Make sure we know what's happening with you. Post things on the blog so we know what's happening with Ronan,' because I didn't want to talk on the phone all the time.
"So the audience was sort of intended at the beginning just to be people who knew me and wanted to know what was happening, and then later I had a good friend — my friend the writer Lisa Glatt — said, 'You know, I think this is a book and I think you should think about it as a book,' and I just thought, 'That's totally not on my radar,' but then, you know, I set it down for a bit, some of the blogs, and I thought, 'Well, maybe, maybe it is,' and I think it was really the only thing that gave me peace in that first year of Ronan's diagnosis. [The] thing I wanted to do every day was to write. I was compelled to do it in a way I never was before."
On grieving her son's death
"This is such a hard thing to explain to someone who hasn't been through it, but when Ronan got his terminal diagnosis, that was the day for me that he died. That was the day of his death for me was Jan. 10, 2011. Not to say that I didn't enjoy being with him through his life, but I felt — I think — the full weight of that loss on the day that he was diagnosed, and when he did die I was relieved that he was released from his suffering, and so that grief is different than it was. It's just, it's qualitatively different, and not that it's not still devastating. It was devastating to watch somebody deteriorating, too, and to know that you couldn't stop it and to worry that there would be more suffering and wanting so deeply to spare him that. ... For me that first year was really the worst, because watching him change and all the hopes kind of dashed and sprinting to the end at the beginning was how I grieved."
Read an excerpt of The Still Point of the Turning World