What Happens After You Receive The Worst Phone Call Imaginable?

The Author, Danielle Crittenden Frum Joins Me For A Live Video Chat On Wednesday May 20 at 5pm ET

Hey Everyone,

This Wednesday at 5pm ET I am doing something a little different. I will be doing a live video chat with a personal friend, the author and journalist - and substacker, Danielle Crittenden Frum about her extraordinary new memoir: Dispatches From Grief: A Mother’s Journey Through The Unthinkable.

On Valentine’s Weekend in 2024, Danielle and her husband David received the appalling news that their beloved 32-year-old daughter Miranda had been found dead in her apartment in Brooklyn. She had been felled by an ordinary virus that most people would have survived. But Miranda did not have a pituitary gland, the result of the surgical removal of a brain tumor five years previously. So her immune system was weakened.

Danielle’s beautifully written book takes us with her on the horrific journey she, David and their two surviving adult children continue to go on. How she found the distance to chronicle their pain in such a raw, tangible way I do not know. I read this book in one sitting on Sunday afternoon. This is an odd thing, perhaps, to say about a book about loss and grief - particularly that of people you know and care about - but reading it was almost uplifting - because everything in it is so relatable.

Part of its power is that Miranda was extraordinary: beautiful, defiant, funny, clever, a bundle of witty complexity who packed more into 32 years than many people do with three times that.

But what Danielle does so magnificently is expose the vulnerabilities that most of us spend our lives hiding, pretending we don’t have. Turns out those vulnerabilities have emotional power that surface polish does not. Gardeners everywhere will relate to the moment she digs up her daughter’s body to move her to a grave where there are flowers. Mothers everywhere will relate to the moment she crawls inside Miranda’s bed to sleep there the night before selling her apartment. Wives everywhere will relate to the way she describes how the devastation impacts spouses differently - but also the same. Even with the unspeakable loss, the Frum family, in Danielle’s telling, is a place we want to be. We understand them. We like them. We feel them.

Anyone who has experienced loss and sorrow will empathize with every word - and perhaps wish we could have phrased what we felt as eloquently as Danielle does here.

It isn’t just Miranda who was extraordinary. Her mother is too.

I hope you will join me on Wednesday at 5pm for what will be a sad but vital conversation about loss, life, survival and the power of writing.