by Ann Hood.

Norton. 189 pages. $21.95.

By Sam Coale
Special to the Journal

The death of a child is unimaginable.

In this searing memoir, Providence novelist Ann Hood incarnates that horror and heart-wrenchingly focuses on trying to, if not make sense of it, at least come to terms with the death of her 5-year-old Grace from a rare form of strep in 2002 — to grapple with the enormity of grief and meaninglessness that swallow her, grasping for details that help to anchor such an inaccessible, random and irreducible event, burdened by “the bone-crushing sorrow, the relentless emptiness of sobbing, arms aching to hold her again.”

Akin to Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, Comfort beautifully discovers images and details to describe her agony: favorite foods (cucumbers), pairs of shoes left at the top of the stairs, colors (pink and purple), the terrifyingly sudden routines of the hospital when Hood screams, and a doctor tells her, “Your daughter is not going to make it.”

In a brilliantly angry and outraged “Prologue,” Hood assaults all the banalities that friends, religious folk and others fling at her: “Time heals. She is in a better place. She is still with you.” She exclaims, “Out in the world there are only five-year-old girls holding their mothers’ hands wherever I go.” She pulverizes “the lies people tell me. There are no words for the size of this grief. There are only lies.”

No matter that time passes. “Time doesn’t heal — it just keeps moving.” Nor that she and her husband eventually adopt an orphaned girl from China; that with her older son Sam and the support of her husband, the shattered family weep together, huddle and wonder, rage and face the paralysis of every day. Grief remains a visceral abyss, a black hole that she can tumble into at any moment without warning: “I know that the smallest thing — a song, a sound, a smell — can send me back there. I do not live here. I only visit.”

Doubts eat at the soul — of religious sustenance, of sense, even of words themselves. They always fall short of experience. Don’t they dodge, evade and falsify? When Hood recognizes early that there is no sense to loss, how can she write? She doesn’t, at first. She knits, she gets a tattoo, she refuses to listen to the Beatles, Grace’s favorite singing group. Even the laundry that’s left in mid-cycle on the day Grace is taken to the hospital remains in place.

And yet, and yet … she begins to turn the ferocity of death into language, living with her bottomless grief: “You go on with it lodged in you. Sometimes I feel like I have swallowed a pile of stones.” You cook, you describe again and again the days of Grace’s illness and her sudden death, you remember coming to Providence, your days in New York, former lovers and Italian aunts.

“Your daughter is not going to make it.” That is unimaginable, and yet Hood re-creates it with her luminous images and hauntingly honest recounting of a mother’s loss. COMFORT: A Journey Through Grief,