Only God Knows Why

Only God Knows Why: A Mother's Memoir of Death and Rebirth
By Amy Lyon (192 pages)
Published by Chalice Press
Bookish rating: 4

This was another book I picked up from Chalice Press, which I mentioned in a previous review of one of their other mommy books. Only God Knows Why falls into the mommy memoir genre that I truly think exists and that I genuinely enjoy reading. But I hesitated on this one due its tragic topic, losing a child to SIDS.

No mother wants to read about her worst nightmare actually happening to someone else.

Yet I felt compelled to read this mother's story. Lyon felt driven to share her story; as a mommy, I needed to stop and listen.

Purely as an outsider, I'm a little bit familiar with the infant loss/bereaved mother community, and I marvel at how these women support each other. I think Lyon's memoir is a important contribution to that community.

As a reader, there's not much for me to critically judge or assess. I have not lost a child, so I'm not about to question Lyon's portrayal of it. She writes very candidly of the crippling postpartum depression she experienced at the beginning of her daughter's life, and to date, it is the best description of PPD that I have read. I also think it was tremendously brave to describe her PPD in detail. My heart just broke for her losing that time with daughter while in the grips of that awful disease.

Lyon depicts the events leading up to, during, and after daughter's death. I bawled my eyes out. I cried for her, I cried for her husband, I cried for those I knew who have lost children who surely endured what Lyon described, I cried for my own fear for my daughters. You cannot read of someone going into an empty nursery and not subconsciously imagine the horror of your own baby's blue and red nursery becoming empty, her laundry still in a basket and the smell of her lingering.

(Ironically, that book I reviewed also published by Chalice Press, Any Day a Beautiful Change, gives voice to this motherly fear for our seemingly perfectly healthy children in a beautifully articulate, accurate way that was deeply reassuring to me---I'm not crazy to worry about my children at this level.)

Lyon breaks your heart repeatedly but also shows how life, eventually, goes--oh so painfully--on. Not in a I-got-over-it sort of way, which would be insulting to anyone in her shoes, but in a one-step-in-front-of-the-other sort of way of just trying to figure out how to cope.

I'm not the intended audience (at least I don't think I am), but there is much in Lyon's experience that any mom can learn from. Recommended.