![]() She is invisible to passersby - to them, there is nothing in the spot next to the tree where she stands laughing and clapping but a patch of grass, and there is nothing in my arms but air. Stooping down, I scoop her up under her soft armpits, her shoulder blades meeting at the pads of my fingers, and I lift her up into the sky. Good choice, baby girl. Oblivious to the people around me, I run to her. Standing in the park, staring at her, I make a strange and primal sound, deep and rich like a belly laugh, hard and sharp like a sob. “We’ve lost her!” She would laugh, run back in, and announce, “Greta came right back!” “Oh no, what have we done?” I would moan. She appears from behind the tree with a flourish, giggling, just like in our old game: She would run out into the hallway from the bedroom where we had been playing, either naked or in her diaper, and cast me an impish look, asking, “Where’s Greta?” I would feign great perplexity, turning over small toys on the floor to see if she was under them, peeking behind the couch, clutching my head in mock terror. Daddy’s coming to get you.Įlated, I enter the park and immediately spot her she is waiting for me, hiding behind the big tree in the clearing between the Vanderbilt playground and the duck pond. Tears spring and run freely down my face. I recognize her. Greta is somewhere nearby. There at the park’s mouth, my heart stirs, and I feel a peculiar elation. I reach the edge of the park, tennis courts to my right. It hits the fence with a loud bong as I run past, but I do not flinch. ![]() Two boys swing a bat lazily to my right, smacking a baseball into the same bulged-out spot on the chain-link. To my left, a middle-school football team is doing speed and endurance drills, dancing frantically on their toes and dropping down for push-ups. I enter the parade grounds and run past fields full of children, my eyes fixed straight ahead. There is no one outside, no one to nod at, make eye contact with, step around. I round the corner on the block that leads to the parade grounds, just outside the park’s southwest entrance. ![]() I step outside and feel only the warmth of the sun. Even within my cocoon of shock, I am sure going there would pierce my defenses, flooding me the way my first trip outside did after she died.Īnd then, one day, just as the summer light is beginning to change, I wake up with a familiar itch. The park was our place, Greta’s and mine - every tree, every leaf, every passing doggy belonged to the two of us. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.Įver since the accident, I have avoided going to the park. This is an unforgettable memoir of courage and transformation-and a book that will change the way you look at the world. With raw honesty, deep emotion, and exquisite tenderness, he captures both the fragility of life and absoluteness of death, and most important of all, the unconquerable power of love. Jayson recognizes, even in the midst of his ordeal, that there will be a life for him beyond it-that if only he can continue moving forward, from one moment to the next, he will survive what seems unsurvivable. But although it begins with this event and with the anguish Jayson and his wife, Stacy, confront in the wake of their daughter's trauma and the hours leading up to her death, Once More We Saw Stars quickly becomes a narrative that is as much about hope and healing as it is about grief and loss. A brick crumbles from a windowsill overhead, striking her unconscious, and she is immediately rushed to the hospital. “A gripping and beautiful book about the power of love in the face of unimaginable loss.”įor readers of The Bright Hour and When Breath Becomes Air, a moving, transcendent memoir of loss and a stunning exploration of marriage in the wake of unimaginable grief.Īs the book opens: two-year-old Greta Greene is sitting with her grandmother on a park bench on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
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