Review of Out of Grief, Singing: A Memoir of Motherhood and Loss

Out of Grief, Singing: A Memoir of Motherhood and Loss

It’s been a very interesting revision of me," professed Canadian author Charlene Diehl to a room of captivated Wilfrid Laurier University students, fans and friends as she presented a reading of her 2010 memoir Out of Grief, Singing. Diehl’s memoir reflects on her life-altering experience of becoming a mother and coping with the grief of losing her first daughter, Chloe, who was born prematurely. “That incredible little girl lived for six days and then she died and then I had to figure out: now what? It was all unclear to me,” she said.

The first section of her book begins in the fall of 1995, presenting the whirlwind of being diagnosed with pre-eclampsia, a disease jeopardizing her and the baby’s health, and having to deliver the baby the very next day. “I did not realize that I was becoming profoundly ill,” Diehl explained. Living in Waterloo and working as a professor at the University of Waterloo’s St. Jerome campus during this difficult period, Diehl found her return to the city to address the audience at Laurier’s faculty of arts to be “a weird experience.” Realizing the painful combination of the setting and the context of her memoir, Diehl chose to veer away from the early segments of the book and present the periods of mourning and revival.

“The return has been long and surprising and strange and wonderful,” said Diehl moments before turning to a passage. She began reading a recollection of a nightmare, which would be one of many that she experienced in the first few months following Chloe’s death. While maintaining an articulate voice, Diehl’s emotions were revealed as the audience could hear her suppressing tears as she slowly described the frozen feeling of mourning. What was visibly the most challenging passage recounted a conversation with her then seven-year-old son Liam whose innocent curiosity required her to explain the decision to have Chloe cremated. “There are many ways to respect the dead, I say to my son, curious and brave in the back seat,” she read. Although she struggled with the question of “how do you mother somebody that you never really got to hold?” Diehl noted that Liam and her daughter Anna have had no difficulty in understanding Chloe’s place in their family. “It’s perfectly obvious to them that they have a sister that is theirs, which seems to me quite remarkable because they both arrived after she had departed,” she said.

In later speaking to an English class at Laurier, Diehl expressed how writing the memoir, while exposing her personal life to the world, helped her piece together the things she remembered and felt during that time. “Stories about grief are the stories that scare the crap out of us all,” she explained. “I don’t think we’ve made room for these stories to be treasured.” Finding death and the loss of loved ones to be an expected part of life, Diehl shared that she doesn’t believe in closure but rather making space to carry grief with her. “I don’t feel impeded by it; I feel energized,” she articulated.

Moving to Winnipeg in 2000 and establishing a new career away from academics as a director for the International Writers' Festival Thin Air, Diehl was able to tap in to her creativity and document and transform her experience. Although the memoir was published more than ten years after Chloe’s death, as Diehl admitted to struggling to find a conclusion to her story, she now reflected on the process of overcoming grief, revealing, “It is one of the most important things each and every one of us will do.


The Cord, Wilfrid Laurier University

More Reviews of this title

Out of Grief, Singing: A Memoir of Motherhood and Loss

Charlene Diehl, the director of Thin Air, Winnipeg’s International Writers Festival, is also the mother of two healthy and active pre-teens. But in 1995, Diehl gave birth to Chloe Denise, who died after living just six days. Diehl has published a memoir about that experience and time following, Out of Grief, Singing (Signature).

At the time, Diehl and her then-husband were living and teaching in Waterloo. Twenty-eight weeks into her pregnancy, a routine checkup indicated pre-eclampsia, a common condition that can be very serious for both mother and baby. After a difficult Caesarian birth, Chloe stayed in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit while Diehl herself was grievously ill and unable to spend much time with her daughter. Chloe passed away on Nov. 28.

The memoir begins with incredible sadness but Diehl also relates how she and her family came to a recovery point. 'I decided I was ready to come back to it,' Diehl says. 'But the hardest work of the book was the aftermath. It’s difficult figuring out what I carry with me?— and how does what I know affect the way I live? I don’t think you get better after an experience like that — you get bigger.'

Diehl says she’s astonished at how widespread but hidden infant loss is. 'It’s a shocking number of people who’ve suffered infant loss,' she says, 'It’s so hard to talk about but that doesn’t mean it fades away. Everything gets locked up in that little door. I’m hopeful that people who to follow me through that story will revisit their own loss and feel like there’s company there.'


Uptown Magazine

Out of Grief, Singing: A Memoir of Motherhood and Loss

I read much of this book not weeping, but sobbing — and yet, the overall experience is one of hope. Out of Grief, Singing will appeal to anyone who has lost a child, to anyone who has lost a loved one, and to anyone engaged in the gruelling and marvellous work of being human.


— Alison Pick The Globe and Mail

Out of Grief, Singing: A Memoir of Motherhood and Loss

Grief — the psychological reaction to loss — is as complicated as it is intense. Though not an easy subject to study, the research on grief has enhanced our understanding of this very human but somewhat elusive experience. Helpful as well have been the personal accounts of loss that have been published over the years. Whereas scientific research tends to describe grief from the outside, with a particular focus on what is common in the experiences of different grieving people, personal accounts show us what the experience looks and feels like from the inside, and by their very nature they highlight the individual qualities of that experience. The very best among these personal accounts reach such a depth of analysis that the boundary between the individual and universal begins to fade — the description of one person’s experience of grief uncovers what is common in the grief experiences of many. Charlene Diehl’s recent book, Out of Grief, Singing, is the most authentic and insightful personal account of grief I have ever read.
 
In her book, subtitled, A Memoir of Motherhood and Loss, Diehl recounts the final hours of her pregnancy, the birth of her premature baby girl Chloe, Chloe’s brief life and death, and the long struggle to come to grips with the devastating loss of her first baby. There is not the slightest hint of sentimentality and no attempt to hide the rawness of her pain. The author leaves no doubt that Chloe’s death shattered her and threatened to destroy her; she writes about her feeling of guilt and her agonizing search for understanding what it meant to be a mother of a child who died. Yet, she also describes how she managed to somehow integrate Chloe’s absence and presence, her death and life. As Diehl writes: 'There is a relationship between the reality of her absence and the reality of her presence — I will spend years wondering how to comprehend it.'
 
Diehl makes it clear that the extremely demanding task to integrate the loss of her baby into her life was hers and that she had to travel the treacherous road from grief to singing, but that she did not have to travel alone. Diehl indicates how people around he — her husband, parents and other family members, friends, medical staff and sometimes even strangers — responded to her situation and how many of them helped her in various ways to muster her strength, honour her sadness, and keep alive the promise of a different yet meaningful life.
 
As an accomplished poet and writer, Diehl might have succumbed to the temptation to look for the most beautiful phrase rather than the most potent one. On the contrary, she channeled her literary abilities to express her experience as truthfully and evocatively as possible. As it turned out, the book is beautifully written, but above all, it demonstrates that a gifted writer can use the power of language to make accessible the most complex and intimate human realities.
 
The book’s story will resonate with those who have faced the loss of a loved one. They will recognize important fragments of their own story and find that consoling. The book is heart wrenching, but also life giving and it engenders faith in the human spirit. And not just for those readers who have suffered loss, but for anyone who wants to learn about the human condition. The French writer Marcel Proust noted: 'Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind'. I would add that grief also develops the powers of the heart and the soul. Charlene Diehl’s book provides ample evidence to support this suggestion.


— Peter Naus

Out of Grief, Singing: A Memoir of Motherhood and Loss

This is a work steeped in melancholy. Its gestation has been long and pain-laced and it is fearless in its defiance of despair. But withal, it is a labour of love, a testament of love, a geography of grief transmuted into a landscape of heroism.

Early in this memoir of soul-wrenching loss and titanic will, the author, having just delivered her child, Chloe, following a life-threatening pregnancy observes of her baby:

"She has pre-dawn eyes, deep blue and clear. She takes my measure as I take hers. We gaze across the gulf of air and challenge, assert our collective will. Both frail and tough, she is an ordinary miracle: a newly minted human. She is my daughter."

Within days she will be dead and a tidal wave of sorrow will carry Charlene Diehl and her partner Bill Jones to a different place. Now will begin a relentless quest by the memoirist to appropriate the horror and the mystery of this death, to penetrate the veil of fear and guilt that encase, isolate and sign the lives of the parents, to achieve - to the degree that such is possible - a modicum of closure: "There's a relationship between the reality of her absence and the reality of her presence - I will spend years wondering how to comprehend it."

The nature of this "relationship" is probed, dissected, re-assembled and re-visioned in ways that are startling and searing. This personal chronicle has a no-holds - barred honesty about it draws the reader into the author's pain.

Diehl is an artist and poet, not a metaphysician, and her memoir as a consequence is distinguished by its imaginative daring: she is profoundly spiritual without being specifically theological. She leads the reader to the universal through the portals of the particular. And so she paints moments of acute pain, physical and emotional, moments of exuberance and delicious delight, moments of chaos and disorientation, and moments that underscore the lightness of being.

All is grace; all is epiphany: "Chloe's death, Chloe's life: this pain might be a gift, if I can figure out how to receive it." This figuring takes the author from November 1995 to 2010, through two subsequent births (Liam and Anna), through a separation from her spouse Bill as they "are no longer able to travel so well in tandem," through the death of her exceptionally grounded father Les, through new professional explorations and through an ever-deepening understanding of love for her model of motherhood, her own mother the Herculean Anna Grace.

In the end, Diehl discerns of her relationship with Chloe that being her mother is "not so much something I do as something I am. She leaves her elusive, delicate traces on the map of my self, and I am the one who is a child, learning to read this script."

And to read Diehl's script - Out of Grief, Singing - is to participate vicariously in the discovery of those 'delicate traces'.


— Michael W. Higgins Fredericton Telegraph-Journal

Out of Grief, Singing: A Memoir of Motherhood and Loss

I can’t help thinking about how I would critique Diehl’s memoir if it were a novel– during most of her daughter’s brief life in the NICU, Diehl was suffering from a variety of post-birth complications and hardly saw her before she died. In a stupid workshop, I would insist on moments of connections, on the impossibility of these parallel storylines (mother and baby both in physical trauma), it doesn’t unfold like a story (but then, from what I’ve heard, death rarely does). We have to bend life a certain way to make it work in fiction, but real life doesn’t bend, does it. And how Diehl makes something so beautiful of it still, the unbendingness of real life. There is such generosity in her story, such grace, and though I’ve sobbed off and on today as I’ve read her book, so often I’ve been crying because of the joy.


— Kerry Clare

Out of Grief, Singing: A Memoir of Motherhood and Loss

Diehl is a poet as well as an academic, and her prose is polished but full. Her words follow a rhythm that can be felt, like a subtle bass note, or a barely audible heartbeat. Out of Grief, Singing is a mother’s love song for her 'gone baby.' Tragic, yes, but beautiful, too.


Quill & Quire

Out of Grief, Singing: A Memoir of Motherhood and Loss

A heartbreaking lament, a beautiful hymn, and a memorable ode to a gone daughter, Out of Grief, Singing claims Chloe’s place in the human family.  With its passion for language, meaning, love, and life in all its unpredictable variety, Diehl’s stunning memoir is destined to reverberate for readers long after they’ve read the last page.


The Winnipeg Review

Out of Grief, Singing: A Memoir of Motherhood and Loss

American novelist Jodi Picoult is acclaimed for her gut-wrenching women's stories, like the story of the euthanasia pact between two siblings in My Sister's Keeper. This memoir of losing an infant, by the director of the annual Winnipeg literary festival Thin Air, digs one level deeper and rises a literary plane higher than Picoult ever could.... Anyone who needs to navigate through deep sorrow will identify with Diehl's in-depth account.


The Winnipeg Free Press

Out of Grief, Singing: A Memoir of Motherhood and Loss

Life Lessons 
Grieving leads to hope, courage, author believes. 

For many people, the loss of a baby is a very personal and private experience they avoid talking about.  

Charlene Diehl wrote a book about it.  She is eager to share her story with those who are facing grief and the people around them.  

"Grieving is a critical, complex, beautiful act," says Winnipeg author of Out of Grief, Singing.  "When you are experiencing a loss, you should attend to it.  Give it space to offer you what it has in store for you.  We need to deveop the muscle and skill set to experience and honor our losses." 

In the book, Diehl shares the story of her first child, Chloe – the physically and emotionally complicated pregnancy, the premature birth, her daughter's life and death, and her own journey through the dark grieving period that followed.  

"It's about how to look at death without feeling desperately afraid," Diehl says. 

This is the book this enthusiastic reader, writer, and director of THIN AIR: Winnipeg International Writers Festival, wanted to read when she was in despair.  

"The reading materials available seemed so terribly banal.  One book said if I were to get up and have a shower one day then good for me.  I hated that book.  That was so not what I wanted to hear."  

Diehl started writing this book eight years ago, before her children Liam and Anna started school.  "It all spewed out – from the hospital to the end of birth." 

This past year, Diehl reworked it and wrote the last section.  "I had to fiure out who this baby is now.  She is not gone, but she is not present like my other children.  She is still a huge force in my life.  For me, this is no longer about the trauma.  It is about something else."  

Diehl is now at a point where she can appreciate the richness of her experience.  

"I can't imagine not having gone through it.  I know courage in me now. I am less fearful and less sad.  I wanted to write it when I could see it from  different place, when I was not afraid of it.  It's my story to tell.  I had the fortune to have this experience, to have this story to tell." 

Recently, Diehl's father died.  She notes the similarities of this loss.  

"The loss of someone you love, of something you cherish leave a vacuum.  There are many kinds of loss, We need to accept what's gone and understand what remains.  Loss is a critical part of being alive."  

What remains is powerful.  "I am not afraid of grief," says Diehl.  "To say that out loud is quite dramatic.  Most poeple are desperately afraid.  If this story can offer people anything, I hope it helps them to realize they can experience loss, survive, and grow."

"I hope people won't be afraid of how sad my story is, and they will read it and see how joyful it is. It's our time to think about the limits of things and how to live big human lives." 


 


— Liz Katynski Prairie books Now

Out of Grief, Singing: A Memoir of Motherhood and Loss

Book recounts journey from grief to song 

Grief can be devestating, but it an also be an enriching experience. A book by a Boissevain native tracks her own personal journey with grief and what is waiting on the other side.  

Winnipeg-based writer Charlene Diehl launched her latest book Out of Grief, Singing on October 7 in McNally Robinson Booksellers, where it had been available since the previous weekend. The deeply personal account of grief is based on her own life experiences.  

"The book is a memoir of the birth & death of my daughter Chloe in 1995," Diehl explained in an e-mail interiew, "and my slow return to health & full spiritual engagement with the world.  It's a meditation on grief, & a kind of celebration of its riches." 

Living in Waterloo, Ontario, in 1995, Diehl discovered she was severely ill with pre-eclampsia, a pregnancy-induced hypertension, while at a routine doctor's appointment.  She went from the doctor's office to the hospital and from there a larger hospital in Hamilton.  Her daughter Chloe was born about 24 hours later.  

"I was gravely ill for most of the week of her life, so it was a very anguished time.  The details form the first third of the narrative – it's still harrowing for me, even all these years later." 

The death of a child is always a devestating time, with many different aspects and depths. 

"I think the grief process is always long & slow," she stated, "particularly so around infant or pregnancy loss, largely because there are so few shared stories to help knit together the community of mourners.  At a funeral or wake, people bring their personal recollections & add them to the mix and everyone feels closer to the person who has died, more aware of their presence and value.  When an infant dies, people are soo shocked & uncomfortable that they often have no idea how to comfort parents, and it doesn't necessarily come naturally to ask them to share a few stories the parents actually do have.  Some of that is shyness, some of it is the intimacy of pregnancy and birth – it can be awkward to share those stories & many people don't know how to receive them and treasure them."  

In her case, Diehl's own grief journey was complicated by her health problems, which continued for several months afterwards.  Getting back on track physically distracted her from "being able to be quiet" with her grief, although she is not sure being healthy would have necessarily made this journey easier.  

"I'm not sure anybody can track their own path through the darkness.  You do what you do, and you trust that you will emerge at some point.  Which I did...the book is really about that." 

When asked what inspired her to write an account of such as personal experience, Diehl said there were several answers.  She said it was a profound event and remains so to this day.  In some ways, she feels as if she is writing to herself from 15 years in the future.  Although writers are supposed to engage readers on a personal level, it can still be wounding and well nigh terrifying to do so.  However, Diehl feels she has always been frank with others about her personal life, and she had something to contribute by sharing her story.   

"When I finally figured out how to tell this particular story and when I had enough distance from the event to understand that a big part of the story is the slow spill of year as I create a life that folds itself around that baby, I wrote with tremendous intensity & genuine excitement.  Mostly I feel very eager to share this telling... I know from just being in the world over the past 15 years that many, many women (and men) suffer the trauma of infant loss and all of us carry around these highly charged stories without knowing how to share them.  So I suppose I feel I am a spokesperson for a huge community of people who have experienced something monumental...it's like a wave under me.  So mostly I'm excited & I've been encouraged and supported by a lot of people...that's really been amazing." 

"I will admit it's been disorienting to hold the book in my hands," she continued, "it's separate from me now, no longer private and in my own care.  It's an exercise in trust at this point." 

The title, she explained came from how she felt from her voice in the immediate aftermath of her loss.  she said she could not really read or think or write, or even easily carry on a conversation.  She found it difficult to sing to herself and felt lost in her sorrow.  Thinking of singing in both literal and figurative terms, Diehl said the title reflects the fact the book "details my journey out of that silent anguish, not only into full voice, but into full singing." 

Diehl said she learned a lot from her experience.  Sorrow can be enriching, she said, if you allow yourself to be transformed by it. 

"It's been a revelation to me that I have become a lot more certain & strong in my own life in the aftermath of Chloe's death, rather than feeling more vulnerable & fearful, as I might have anticipated.  It's like I've gone a long way toward setting aside out cultural anxiety about death...I find it as painful as anyone else to lose someone precious, but I am more certain about the gifts one receives in the process, more grateful for the experience of being alive, more aware of how it links into the mystery of death." 

Diehl will be reading from her book at Merle Neufeld and Marilyn Derksen's home outside of Boissevain at 7:30 on October 15.  She said Boissevain is her home and although she was living in Waterloo when Chloe was born, she escaped to her hometown for a few weeks after the death to the quiet, open space and her parents. 

"So in a way I suppose I wanted to bring the book back," she explained, "it's a chance to thank that community for strengthening me and supporting me along the way." 

Diehl is the director of the Winnipeg International Writers Festival, which holds different events throughout the year, as well as the week long festival THIN AIR in the fall.  She also edits a bi-monthly jazz magazine called dig!, and writes and perfoms poetry.  She said she is very happy with the way Out of Grief, Singing turned out, and gopes it has an impact beyond herself.  

"The fact that my connection with that baby shifts & deepens over time fascinates me and it comforts me too," Diehl stated. "I hope (the book) brings from solace to others and I hope also that it creates oppotunities to speak about a kind of loss which is terrifying but also largely silent/silencing." 


— Paul Rayner The Recorder

Join us on Facebook Facebook Follow us on Twitter Twitter

up Back to top