There exists a term to describe the transformation women undergo when becoming mothers—matrescence—which characterizes how their bodies and minds adapt to nurturing a child. Yet there is no word for what occurs when that child is lost.
Danielle Crittenden’s memoir, Dispatches from Grief: A Mother’s Journey Through the Unthinkable, explores this profound void. When her eldest daughter Miranda died at age 32 in February 2024, Crittenden entered an uncharted realm she termed an “Alternate Universe.”
“The loss of a child upends the natural order,” she writes. “A meteor crashes into your personal galaxy. The universe as you knew it is destroyed forever. Even the laws of physics are scrambled: Maybe feathers weigh more than bowling balls. Maybe the moon appears at dawn and the sun rises at midnight. Nothing means what it meant before.”
Crittenden’s final interaction with Miranda was a text message: her daughter sent a selfie, wrote “Stunning!” and promised to do her best. Within two days, in the middle of the night on February 2024, she died in her apartment, likely from taking the wrong dosage of medication after successful brain tumor surgery.
Grief, Crittenden argues, is both universal and intensely personal—a landscape defined by questions like “How could I have stopped this from happening?” “Why her?” “How could God let this happen?” and the relentless weight of sadness. It is also riddled with platitudes others impose: “You’ll feel better with time,” “She’s in a better place,” and, worst of all, the implausible notion that it could be worse.
Crittenden bristles at “happiness hucksters” and pat answers to unanswerable tragedy. She finds solace in Jewish traditions surrounding grief and burial, which acknowledge the fragile state of the mourner and the dignity of the dead. Yet her deepest comfort comes from C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed, which she describes as offering “no platitudes about healing. No pat assurances. No promises of eventual peace.”
Her prose is sparse but pungent: “The pain simmered in my chest like a covered pot. Then, several times a day and without warning, it would boil over.” For Crittenden, losing a child means mourning not just the child but “the person you used to be”—someone who will never return.
Crittenden describes her daughter’s free spirit: Miranda struggled academically but traveled the world in adulthood. “Looking back,” she writes, “there was not a single day of Miranda’s life when I didn’t worry about her.”
As Crittenden navigates the “Bureaucracy of Death,” making burial preparations and cleaning her daughter’s apartment (technically illegal until the court probates Miranda’s will), she describes the misery of the recently bereaved: “When people asked how I was feeling, I’d compare myself to a prisoner adjusting to life without parole.”
The book is not without humor. During a trip with her other daughter to Musée de l’Orangerie, Monet’s water lilies reminded Crittenden of Miranda, and she began to sob. A security guard, “sick of lifeless selfie-taking tourists,” nodded approvingly.
Eventually, Crittenden discovers what “moving on” looks like: it means not drinking to forget but savoring life with a glass of wine; trying EMDR therapy for trauma. Yet there is no “good” to come from Miranda’s death. As she writes: “I’ve joined the centuries-long chain gang of human misery, yes. But let’s not dress it up as enlightenment. Miranda’s death is not my spiritual gain.”
While well-wishers offer trite comforts, Crittenden finds her only goal is to keep living. “I have to remember that Sean’s life was a gift,” another mother says. “And also that my life is a gift.” It is this last truth that sticks with her.
“Miranda wouldn’t want you miserable,” she writes. “Trying to honor her memory is not enough. I need to embrace my own gift of life to move forward.”
To become a mother is to expose yourself to the possibility of immense pain—pain that, in order to survive, you must imagine will never come your way. But if it does, there is a community of mourners waiting to greet you.