The Loneliest Places: Loss, Grief, and the Long Journey Home
"A child's suicide pitches you into a hellish place of fragmentary images, the deepest depression imaginable, efforts to destroy yourself, and an almost complete break with what's happening in the world around you. That was my experience. I wish it upon no one."

The essays of The Loneliest Places began as a chronicle of Rachel Dickinson's life after her son's suicide. The pieces became much more. Dickinson writes the unimaginable and terrifying facts of heartbreaking loss. In The Loneliest Places she tells stories from her months on the run, fleeing her grief and herself, as she escapes to Iceland and the Falkland Islands—as far as possible from the memories of her dead son, Jack. She frankly relates the paralyzing emotion that sometimes left her trapped in her home, confined to a single chair, helplessly isolated.

The tales from these years are bleak and Dickinson's journey home, back to her changed self and fractured family, is lonely. Conjuring Emily Dickinson, however, she describes how hope was sighted, allowed to perch, and then, remarkably, made actual.

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The Loneliest Places: Loss, Grief, and the Long Journey Home
"A child's suicide pitches you into a hellish place of fragmentary images, the deepest depression imaginable, efforts to destroy yourself, and an almost complete break with what's happening in the world around you. That was my experience. I wish it upon no one."

The essays of The Loneliest Places began as a chronicle of Rachel Dickinson's life after her son's suicide. The pieces became much more. Dickinson writes the unimaginable and terrifying facts of heartbreaking loss. In The Loneliest Places she tells stories from her months on the run, fleeing her grief and herself, as she escapes to Iceland and the Falkland Islands—as far as possible from the memories of her dead son, Jack. She frankly relates the paralyzing emotion that sometimes left her trapped in her home, confined to a single chair, helplessly isolated.

The tales from these years are bleak and Dickinson's journey home, back to her changed self and fractured family, is lonely. Conjuring Emily Dickinson, however, she describes how hope was sighted, allowed to perch, and then, remarkably, made actual.

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The Loneliest Places: Loss, Grief, and the Long Journey Home

The Loneliest Places: Loss, Grief, and the Long Journey Home

by Rachel Dickinson
The Loneliest Places: Loss, Grief, and the Long Journey Home

The Loneliest Places: Loss, Grief, and the Long Journey Home

by Rachel Dickinson

Paperback

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$19.95 
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Overview

"A child's suicide pitches you into a hellish place of fragmentary images, the deepest depression imaginable, efforts to destroy yourself, and an almost complete break with what's happening in the world around you. That was my experience. I wish it upon no one."

The essays of The Loneliest Places began as a chronicle of Rachel Dickinson's life after her son's suicide. The pieces became much more. Dickinson writes the unimaginable and terrifying facts of heartbreaking loss. In The Loneliest Places she tells stories from her months on the run, fleeing her grief and herself, as she escapes to Iceland and the Falkland Islands—as far as possible from the memories of her dead son, Jack. She frankly relates the paralyzing emotion that sometimes left her trapped in her home, confined to a single chair, helplessly isolated.

The tales from these years are bleak and Dickinson's journey home, back to her changed self and fractured family, is lonely. Conjuring Emily Dickinson, however, she describes how hope was sighted, allowed to perch, and then, remarkably, made actual.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781501766091
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Publication date: 10/15/2022
Pages: 248
Product dimensions: 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Rachel Dickinson is a travel writer, essayist, artist, and award-winning author. Follow her on X @rachelbirds.

Table of Contents

Beginning
Autumn, Again
One Night
Thoughts You Have While at Your Son's Funeral
Withdrawn
Running Away
Adirondack Anniversary
Clara and Jack Sing a Duet
Seeking Permission from Donald Hall
Thoughts
Guns in the Attic
The People Who Stayed
Train Robbers and Pinkertons
Hope Is a Strange Invention
Vertigo
Thrown for a Loop
Why I Stay
The Ways in Which I Fall
Rage
Let Me Be Frank
Angry at a Dead Son
The Gentle Arts
Mourning and Melancholia, Rejected
Travel
Pursuit of Aloneness
December Snow
Merry Effing Christmas
Learning to Travel
Give Up the Ghost
Birding on Bleaker Island
Speculation
Fictional World
What Would I Take If My House Was on Fire
The Time Tim Went to Cuba
Dreamworld
Going to the Spiritualist Camp
Searching
The Dude Ranch
Visitation
Searching for Home in Italy
The Pull of Water
Change
Minefields
Soft Edges
Called Back
Lonely
Jane at the End
The Other Jack Gallagher
Staying in a Ghost Town
Anticipation
Beside the Volcano
Comeuppance
Feeling Isolated
Tim Writes Me a Letter
The Truth about Selfishness
The Present
The Corncrake

What People are Saying About This

author of They Said They Wanted Revolution

"In a heroic feat of reflection and journalism, Rachel Dickinson brings the reader with her as she travels in search of the answer to the unanswerable why. The Loneliest Places is a testament to her resilience, maternal love, and the righteous fury felt by all of us who are left behind to grieve."

Steve Bodio

Rachel Dickinson's book is harrowing, heartbreaking, and fascinating. You cannot turn away. She is the bravest writer I know.

Bethanne Patrick

Writing in the wake of her son Jack's suicide, Rachel Dickinson shows that fragments contain worlds and connected fragments can build worlds. The truths on these pages are hard won and haunting, but also warm and surprising. The Loneliest Places will remind you that the most beautiful journeys take place in our hearts.

Jennifer Brice

In the years after her son's suicide, Rachel Dickinson traveled to extraordinary places. Travel writing for her became a way to transform rage into art, and The Loneliest Places is nothing short of art: memorable and harrowing.

Mick Cochrane

Rachel Dickinson's voice is fresh and utterly engaging. She has a special gift for the irresistibly direct sentence. In The Loneliest Places a reader will find honesty, self-awareness, and trust.

Neda Toloui-Semnani

In a heroic feat of reflection and journalism, Rachel Dickinson brings the reader with her as she travels in search of the answer to the unanswerable why. The Loneliest Places is a testament to her resilience, maternal love, and the righteous fury felt by all of us who are left behind to grieve.

Greg Bottoms

The Loneliest Places contains multitudes: landscapes, portraits, meditations, memories, facts and contexts, blunt assessments, lightness, hope, wisdom, and admirable artistry.

Sarah Rose

Rachel Dickinson is at heart a travel writer who, with a deft hand and discerning eye, leads us through a ruined landscape of grief. Her journey to make sense of this new territory created by her son's death is, at turns, meditative, heartbreaking, and beautiful. I could not look away.

Jean Guerrero

An unforgettable and unflinching portrait of a mother's grief, The Loneliest Places offers frank solace to anyone who has lost a loved one. In sharp and staggering prose, Rachel Dickinson recounts her struggle to drag her very self out of the wreckage left by her son's suicide. Her writing is a riveting act of resilience and literary beauty.

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