Ann was no stranger to grief. Her brother, her only sibling,
drowned in a bathtub when Ann was a graduate student. Soon after her
sixty-seven year old father died after a six-month battle with lung cancer from
fungal pneumonia. Shortly after her father's death, Ann experienced a
miscarriage. Still even with the experience as a bereaved sibling, bereaved
daughter, and finally her miscarriage, nothing prepared Ann for the extreme
emptiness she experienced after Grace's death years later.
In her memoir recounting her daughter's death and the
aftermath, Comfort: A Journey Through Grief, Ann talks about how people woudl often
suggest that she write things down, express her feelings on paper, and this
increased her anxiety with her inability to write and with their continued
suggestions. Ann eventually found comfort in learning how to knit. Some people
have written about the meditative effects of knitting and its almost healing
quality.
When Ann was able to write again, a year and a half after
Grace's death, she took her new interest in knitting and her knowledge of grief
and blended them into a fictional book called The Knitting Circle. The book chronicles a story of a bereaved mother whose
marriage ends after the child's death and the mother's discovery of knitting
and a group of friends who offer each other the support and love that they each
need.
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