A review by knkoch
When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back: Carl's Book by Naja Marie Aidt

dark emotional reflective sad slow-paced

3.25

A heartrending meditation on the sudden, profound loss and grief a mother experiences with the loss of her son. Aidt chronicles her destabilizing and all-encompassing grief through flashbacks, poems, and fragments, finding kinship in the work of other writers who weathered a similar loss. She paints a very detailed portrait of the way time stops for the living, the way a lost person lives within you but in devastating silence, the inevitable and enormous change a grieving person undergoes in their priorities and personality, and the sheer inadequacy of language to encompass her experience. I’ve not experienced this particular type of loss, but Aidt’s very personal examinations were still quite illuminating.