Antiphon: A Call and Response in a Year of Grief and Renewal - Paperback

by Jane Flynn (Author), Christina Holbrook (Author)

Two friends find themselves confronting live-shattering circumstances: the death of a child by suicide and the diagnosis of a glioblastoma brain tumor. Engulfed by pain, they ask each other: "What if? What if we just write to each other? Anything. Just write."

Over the course of the next year, these two women-one in New York City, the other in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado-embark on a deliberate correspondence to rescue themselves and each other from overwhelming grief. As the months pass, the act of writing and bearing witness to one another transforms each woman's journey through terrible loss into a courageous affirmation of resilience and of lives well lived.

"We've been friends for over forty-five years, since high school," Chris and Jane explain, remembering with humor their experiences as the awkward and unlikely co-captains of the Scarsdale High School JV Field Hockey team. Both women went on to attend Wellesley College outside of Boston. "But our adult lives took very different trajectories, and part of what this epistolary project allowed us to explore, as we reckoned with grief and mortality, were those experiences that we all share, that make us who we are as human beings: the desire for love, the challenge of navigating close personal relationships, the reality of grief and loss, the longing for a life of meaning. We have loved these months of corresponding with each other for the simple yet life-affirming feeling of having someone to walk with in the deep woods."