Alan’s Reviews > Things in Nature Merely Grow > Status Update

That a mother can do all things humanly possible for a child, and yet she can never understand the incommunicable vastness and strangeness of the world felt by that child; that a mother cannot make the world just a little more welcoming so the child feels less alone; that a mother cannot keep that child alive-these are facts I have to live with now, every single day, for the rest of my life.

Now that I have a garden, I've come to understand Trevor's point: gardening is good training for a novelist. One learns to be patient, one learns to make concessions, one learns to redefine one's visions and ambitions, and one learns to stop being a perfectionist. A garden is good training for life too.

You did everything you could to help James find his place in life, but he wanted to leave and one must let go—

Very few people, in my experience, have the moral courage to say what Christiane said to me on that day, precisely an hour and a half after a child’s death.

“This book is about life's extremities, about facts and logic, written from a particularly abysmal place where no parent would want to be. This book will neither ask the questions you may want me to ask nor provide the closure you may expect the book to offer.”