I Promise It Won’t Always Hurt Like This: 18 Assurances on Grief

Mystery novelist Mackintosh (The Last Party) shares in this cathartic account the lessons she learned after the death of her five-week-old son, Alex. Three weeks after his premature birth, Alex’s health issues began to snowball, from a bacterial infection to meningitis to a brain hemorrhage. Eventually, Mackintosh and her husband made the devastating decision to take Alex off life support and end his suffering. Almost two decades later, Mackintosh opens up about that experience, structuring her thoughts around “a series of promises: my commitment to [readers] that the sun will rise again.” Each of the 18 chapters are baseed on a lesson she’s learned in the 18 years since Alex’s death, including that grievers “won’t always lie awake at night, sobbing until [they] cannot breathe,” and that the deceased “won’t always be [their] first thought in the morning.” Throughout, Mackintosh expresses her anguish with striking candor, labeling her feeling after Alex’s passing as “raw, choking pain impossible to describe to those who haven’t felt it.” While certain assurances come across more like platitudes than hard-won truths (including the promise that every mourner will “find someone who understands”), for the most part, Mackintosh delivers a salve for broken hearts. Readers who’ve been touched by loss will find comfort in these pages. (Mar.)