“Trouble, when it comes, is not as we expect it to be,” Joan Didion wrote after losing the love of her life. “The people we love the most become part of our body,” Meghan O'Rourke noted in her fondest memory of the loss, “embedded in our synapses, in the mechanisms by which memories are created.” Those unexpected doses of sadness and traces of love are what celebrate the British children's author and poet. Michael Rosen faced when his eighteen-year-old son Eddie died suddenly of meningitis. Endless though the grieving process may be, Rosen began to bring out the rough edges and more subtle situations five years later. The Sad Book of Michael Rosen (public library) – a touching addition to the best children's books about loss, reflected by all Quentin Blake.
With extraordinary emotional beauty, Rosen embraces the layers of grief, each revealing a different shade of sadness — a sadness that descends halfway down the street; the sadness that lurks behind the happiest moments; sorrow that likes you like a shawl that you don't take off even in the shower.
What emerges is a wonderful bow before the central paradox of the human experience – the realization that the heart's great power of love is accompanied by an equal power of pain, and yet we love anyway and somehow find fragments of that love even among the ruins of loss.
This makes me sad.
Maybe you think I'm happy in this picture.
I'm really sad but I pretend to be happy.
I do this because I think people won't like me if I look sad.
Sometimes the sadness is too great.
It's everywhere. All over me.
Then I look like this.
And there's nothing I can do about it.What makes me sad is when I think about my son Eddie. I loved him very much, but he died anyway.
With great perspective, Rosen captures the conflicting emotions that lie beneath mourning – love and anger, self-centeredness and longing for communion – and how loss lingers in the mind so that the vestiges of some loss always evoke the sadness of all loss, that never-ending heartache of seeing the ever-changing dynamics of our long transition.
Sometimes this really makes me angry.
I say in my heart, “How dare you go and die like that?
How can you make me sad?”
Eddie said nothing,
because he is no longer here.
Sometimes I want to talk about all this with someone else.
Like my mother. But he is not here anymore. So I can't.
I'm getting another one. And I tell them all about it.
Sometimes I don't want to talk about it.
Not to anyone. He doesn't exist at all.
I just want to think about it alone.
Because it's mine. And no one else.
But what makes the story unique and rewarding is that it refuses to indulge in the culture of postponing disaster with the promise of a silver lining. It is not redeeming in the making of redemption but in being true to human experience – deeply, beautifully, tragically true.
Sometimes because I'm depressed I do crazy things – like yelling in the shower…
Sometimes I'm in pain and I don't know why.
Just a cloud that comes and covers me.
Not because Eddie is gone.
Not because my mother is gone. It's just because.
Blake, who illustrated Sylvia Plath's eponymous children's book and many of Roald Dahl's stories, brings her own sense of expressiveness to the book, here and there incorporating Rosen's abstract words into visual vignettes that make you wonder what loss of hers she envisioned as she drew.
Where is the sadness?
Sadness is everywhere.
It comes and gets you.
When is it sad?
It's sad any time.
It comes and gets you.
Who is sad?
Sad anyone.
It comes and gets you.
Fill completely to stop the air The Sad Book of Michael Rosen and Oliver Jeffers The Heart and the Bottle and Japanese artwork A Little Treethen revisit Joan Didion in grief.
