{"id":12699,"date":"2026-04-02T21:42:57","date_gmt":"2026-04-03T01:42:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/a-beautiful-anatomy-of-loss-illustrated-by-quentin-blake-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2026-04-02T21:42:57","modified_gmt":"2026-04-03T01:42:57","slug":"a-beautiful-anatomy-of-loss-illustrated-by-quentin-blake-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/a-beautiful-anatomy-of-loss-illustrated-by-quentin-blake-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"A Beautiful Anatomy of Loss, Illustrated by Quentin Blake \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
\n<\/p>\n

\n

<\/a>\u201cGrief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be,\u201d<\/em> Joan Didion wrote<\/a> after losing the love of her life. \u201cThe people we most love do become a physical part of us,\u201d<\/em> Meghan O\u2019Rourke observed in her magnificent memoir of loss<\/a>, \u201cingrained in our synapses, in the pathways where memories are created.\u201d<\/em> Those wildly unexpected dimensions of grief and the synaptic traces of love are what celebrated British children\u2019s book writer and poet Michael Rosen<\/strong> confronted when his eighteen-year-old son Eddie died suddenly of meningitis. Never-ending though the process of mourning may be, Rosen set out to exorcise its hardest edges and subtlest shapes five years later in Michael Rosen\u2019s Sad Book<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) \u2014 an immensely moving addition to the finest children\u2019s books about loss<\/a>, illustrated by none other than the great Quentin Blake<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

With extraordinary emotional elegance, Rosen welcomes the layers of grief, each unmasking a different shade of sadness \u2014 sadness that sneaks up on you mid-stride in the street; sadness that lurks as a backdrop to the happiest of moments; sadness that wraps around you like a shawl you don\u2019t take off even in the shower.<\/p>\n

What emerges is a breathtaking bow before the central paradox of the human experience \u2014 the awareness that the heart\u2019s enormous capacity for love is matched with an equal capacity for pain, and yet we love anyway and somehow find fragments of that love even amid the ruins of loss.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

This is me being sad.
Maybe you think I\u2019m happy in this picture.
Really I\u2019m sad but pretending I\u2019m happy.
I\u2019m doing this because I think people won\u2019t like me if I look sad.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

Sometimes sad is very big.
It\u2019s everywhere. All over me.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

Then I look like this.
And there\u2019s nothing I can do about it.<\/p>\n

What makes me most sad is when I think about my son Eddie. I loved him very, very much but he died anyway.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

With exquisite nuance, Rosen captures the contradictory feelings undergirding mourning \u2014 affection and anger, self-conscious introspection and longing for communion \u2014 and the way loss lodges itself in the psyche so that the vestiges of a particular loss always awaken the sadness of the all loss, that perennial heartbreak of beholding the absurdity of our longing for permanence in a universe of constant change<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

Sometimes this makes me really angry.
I say to myself, \u201cHow dare he go and die like that?
How dare he make me sad?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

Eddie doesn\u2019t say anything,
because he\u2019s not here anymore.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

Sometimes I want to talk about all this to someone.
Like my mum. But she\u2019s not here anymore, either. So I can\u2019t.
I find someone else. And I tell them all about it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

Sometimes I don\u2019t want to talk about it.
Not to anyone. No one at all.
I just want to think about it on my own.
Because it\u2019s mine. And no one else\u2019s.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

But what makes the story most singular and rewarding is that it refuses to indulge the cultural clich\u00e9 of cushioning tragedy with the promise of a silver lining. It is redemptive not in manufacturing redemption but in being true to the human experience \u2014 intensely, beautifully, tragically true.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

Sometimes because I\u2019m sad I do crazy things \u2014 like shouting in the shower\u2026<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

Sometimes I\u2019m sad and I don\u2019t know why.
It\u2019s just a cloud that comes along and covers me up.
It\u2019s not because Eddie\u2019s gone.
It\u2019s not because my mum\u2019s gone. It\u2019s just because.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Blake, who has previously illustrated Sylvia Plath\u2019s little-known children\u2019s book<\/a> and many of Roald Dahl\u2019s stories<\/a>, brings his unmistakably expressive sensibility to the book, here and there concretizing Rosen\u2019s abstract words into visual vignettes that make you wonder what losses of his own he is holding in the mind\u2019s eye as he draws.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

Where is sad?
Sad is everywhere.
It comes along and finds you.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

When is sad?
Sad is anytime.
It comes along and finds you.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

Who is sad?
Sad is anyone.
It comes along and finds you.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Complement the absolutely breath-stopping Michael Rosen\u2019s Sad Book<\/em><\/strong><\/a> with Oliver Jeffers\u2019s The Heart and the Bottle<\/em><\/a> and the Japanese masterpiece Little Tree<\/em><\/a>, then revisit Joan Didion on grief<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cGrief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be,\u201d Joan Didion wrote after losing the love of her life. \u201cThe people we […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12700,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12699","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-purpose"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12699","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12699"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12699\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12700"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12699"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12699"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}