Summary:

This little volume of poetry and photos is a narrative of the life and death of a small boy with leukemia and the connection this creates with his mother, his father, and his stepfather. The poems are created by the child’s mother (the author) during the illness and after the death of her son in his early childhood; photos are done by the author’s brother. The author creates the scenario in her brief introduction to the collection of poems and photos.

In a stuttering fashion, the reader is guided through mother’s grief as she holds her son through multiple chemotherapy sessions, reevaluations, disappointments, and finally, the terminal events. The entire poetic experience is calmly reflective, but the deep grief of mother bubbles to the surface--in a controlled manner that makes the reader feel her pain, and also accept her acceptance.

The poems themselves are compelling in their simplicity: after Sam dies, the author writes, of a note of condolence received by a friend, "Now that I have a child of my own, / a friend writes, "I understand your loss." / "No," I think, "now you understand / what I had."

The author, as she adapts to the absence of her firstborn, has a second son. She reflects on the joy that she feels, but the impossibility of replacing a first love. The event of Sam’s death is so ethereal that it cannot be dated. It is a universal experience for those left behind. And Hutner leaves the reader with this sense of timelessness with her poetry, and with her own death from breast cancer in 2002.

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