Spotlight: Reaching for Beautiful: A Memoir of Loving and Losing a Wild Child by Sally McQuillen
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For fans of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking or David Sheff’s Beautiful Boy, this debut memoir about a mother grieving her young-adult son’s death is a must-read for any parent who has lost a child or whose child struggles with addiction.
A luminous story of how love triumphs over pain, love transcends fear, and love never dies; this debut memoir from a mother grieving her young-adult son’s death is a must-read for any parent who has lost a child, is raising a child from the edge of their seat, or whose family struggles with addiction.
When Sally’s twenty-one-year-old son died in a boat accident, her greatest fear is realized. Christopher was often drawn to risk and struggled with addiction. In this riveting memoir, Sally captures the wild ride of his jam-packed life and her deep love for him while reflecting on her own childhood and family’s legacy of alcoholism.
Sally shares insights about what it’s like to experience the emotional aftershocks of acute grief, filtered through the lens of her personal experience as a mother and her professional vantage point as a psychotherapist. Even if they have not been touched by loss in this way, readers may see themselves in Sally’s bittersweet illusion of trying to keep her son safe, in how she is challenged to let go of her fear, guilt, and regret in order to forgive herself, and in the ways grief teaches her about the power of love.
Excerpt
Unless they’re in extreme denial, every parent of a child struggling with addiction experiences the very real fear that their child could die. Once you come to terms with the fact they have a disease, you realize it could kill them. If you yourself have been in recovery and attended meetings, then you’ve seen firsthand the lives lost to this brutal affliction with every passing year you stay sober. And once you realize you can’t prevent your kids from getting disease, it becomes about making sure they survive it.
There he was. With dirt under his fingernails and shaggy, greasy hair in his eyes, Christopher was gorgeous to me. He didn’t have much to say, as expected, but I could tell that neither a drink nor a drug had crossed his lips in two months. The sparkle was back in his eyes. Along with it, a touch of tenderness, maybe even contentment, shone on his tanned face. I realized in that moment that his heart and soul had been hiding, and now his light was turned back on. He had a gentle glow, and I turned to it. Along with his glow was a flicker of warmth. I drew closer.
This mama bird and my fellow bereaved mothers carry an emptiness that is so gaping it takes over. The pain is so great I ask myself how it’s possible that so many of us could be living with it. It is simply unfathomable. The mama bird sounds her alarm, and I am sobbing with all of the mothers who’ve withstood the suffering and death of their babies from physical illness, the mothers who’ve felt the despair of losing their sons and daughters to the devastation of suicide, the increasing masses of mothers whose children have been taken by the opioid epidemic, by murder, or accident—and any and all of the other ways mothers could lose their children that I have failed to include. I ache for us all.
One might think we would be acclimated to grief as mothers. There is a cumulative series of goodbyes at each milestone. Our generation not only celebrates each development, but we literally congratulate our kids for growing up. Our children shape-shift, and the years fly by with a whisper of grief along the way if we stop to notice it. But we rarely do. My heart is tugged at every age and stage without respite. Nothing lasts, nothing stays the same.
The toughest stuff of grief consists of regret, guilt, and pure pain. Grief has a mind of its own. When it comes, it hits hard. Familiar but still surprising in its power, descending as sharply as ever. Messy and unpredictable and tiring. I’m slapped in the face by its insistence. There is healing to be found in allowing the sadness of missing him to enter. It feels like loyalty. It feels like love. We are so connected that he is a part of me. I move through my pain more easily when I refrain from judging myself for it. I am dragged through its clutches, but then I come up for air and picture Christopher’s green eyes smiling, giving me the strength to keep going.
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About the Author
Sally McQuillen, LCSW, CADC, is a psychotherapist in private practice specializing in addiction recovery, grief, and trauma healing. An avid reader with a double major in writing and dance criticism in college, she began working in public relations and marketing prior to obtaining her master’s degree in social work. Reaching for Beautiful is Sally’s first book. She and her husband live on the north shore of Chicago where they raised their three children.
