About the book
On a February morning, Danielle Crittenden received the call no parent can prepare for: Her thirty-two-year-old daughter Miranda had been found dead in her Brooklyn apartment.
In an instant, Crittenden’s world split in two: the life before, and the life that must somehow continue after. In Dispatches from Grief, Crittenden maps the landscape of loss with a journalist’s eye and a mother’s heart, chronicling not only the shattering impact of a child’s death but the strange afterlife of grief itself—how it reshapes friendships, routines, and the very sense of self.
With honesty and grace, Crittenden captures grief in its terrible specificity—the police call, the burial dress, the well-meaning “griefsplaining”—as well as love in its most distilled form. Written with luminous prose and dark humor, Dispatches from Grief is both a singular portrait of loss and a universal meditation on love’s aftermath, offering true companionship to anyone who has loved deeply and lost profoundly.
