Two years after her mother's death from breast cancer, Caitlin, then 20 years old, was admitted to a psychiatric facility after a suicide attempt. In the wake of this enormous loss, Caitlin questions her religion, comes to terms with her sexuality, and searches for a way to live with severe depression and anxiety. Filled with imagery, vulnerability and depth, The Mourning Report honestly and gracefully unpacks a trifecta of trauma.
Years later, unable to come to terms with her mother's death, Caitlin decides to embark on a "grief journey," interviewing the people involved in her mother's dying process: a hospice nurse, a priest, an estate planner, a hairstylist, and a funeral director. If she figures out how they can function after being so close to her mother's death, then maybe she can learn how to navigate her own life. Each chapter of The Mourning Report is centered on each interview and the memories, anxieties, and reflections that is stimulated. It asks what it means to "move on."
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We learned, 'Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes' when I was in pre-school, and one kid tried to do the motions so fast he made himself dizzy and threw up. CHAPTER ONE, THE SEED COLLECTOR
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(Homebound Publications, 6 October 2020, 168 pages, ebook, copy from the publisher via # NetGalley and voluntarily reviewed)
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I thought this was an incredibly sad book, very moving at times but heart-breaking. Its clear Caitlin's never got over her mother's death and her grief, many years later still shapes her life. Grief affects people in different ways. Not everyone will respond the same way or take the same amount of time to move on. My Gran died almost twenty years ago and my Mum still grieves her though it has gotten easier over time. I don't think about Gran very often. I cried a lot reading The Mourning Report because the author had allowed me the privilege of sharing her grief and mourning process. I wanted to hug her. I found the people she decided to interview an interesting choice as they were not always the most obvious person I expected her to want to speak to. The chapter where she speaks to the hospice nurse is quite upsetting as it becomes clear the patient they are discussing is not Caitlin's mother but she chooses not to say anything. The interviews are interwoven with flashbacks of her mother's illness and death and the life of the family before she became ill. There is a ray of hope though, at the end that Caitlin may have started to heal.
