By Joanna Rowland
A young child whose loved one has died starts filling a box with photos and keepsakes, afraid that one day she'll forget them.
A little girl has lost someone she loved, and what frightens her most isn't the death itself — it's that someday she might not remember them clearly. So she finds a box. In go a photograph, a ticket stub, a lock of hair, a note in handwriting she wants to keep. She writes the memories down too: the happy ones, the funny ones, and the ones that make her cry before she reaches the end. Some days she opens the box and it comforts her. Some days she opens it and it hurts, so she closes it again, and the book lets her. It walks with her through a whole year, holidays and birthdays and all, and never once tells her the grieving should be over. Who died is deliberately left unnamed. That's the design, and it's why so many counselors and hospices reach for it — it fits whoever your family has lost.
Most grief books ask your child to feel something. This one asks them to make something, and for a young child that's an easier door to walk through. The box is a real project you can start the same afternoon with a shoebox, and having a task to do steadies a child when everything else feels out of their hands. It also gives permission for something children don't expect: that the sadness comes back at Christmas, on a birthday, months down the road, and that none of that means they're grieving wrong. Thea Baker's collage art is soft and dreamy, so the pages never turn clinical the way a book with 'grief' in its title can.