Michael Rosen's Sad Book

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after newsletter promotion And now there was a hole. There was a gap on the sofa. How would I cope with it?

In Getting Better, Rosen describes the moment he discovered a photograph of a baby boy sitting on his mother’s knee. When he asked his father who the boy was, Rosen or his older brother, Brian, his father said neither – that it was a third son, Alan, who had died as an infant, before Rosen was born. Rosen was 10 at the time. Nobody in his family had spoken of Alan previously, there were no photographs of him in the house. And though Rosen’s father, Harold, mentioned Alan from time to time over the course of his life, Rosen never spoke about him with his mother, Connie. I’m not sure this book would be suitable for a sensitive child who had not lost a loved one, especially as Rosen is writing about the sudden death of his son, but for anyone in the early throes of grief, including young children, it’s beautiful, cathartic, and true. Another example of the government’s “crazed incompetence” in his view has been the handling of schools and universities during the pandemic, in particular the uncertainty surrounding exams. Both his parents were teachers, and he “imbibed” not just their socialist politics, but a passion for education (on which he writes regularly for the Guardian). He’s never been a fan of what he recently described in one of his columns as the “rigid, prescriptive, formulaic approach” of the primary school curriculum, and an “addiction” to exam testing. His youngest son Emile was due to be sitting his GCSEs this year and his daughter Elsie is in her first year at university, but has been at home until last month. “It is an awful situation for teachers, pupils and students to be in,” he says. Every day I try to do one thing I can be proud of. Then, when I go to bed, I think very, very hard about this one thing.” It has now been 23 years since Eddie’s death. For the most part, Rosen has succeeded in escaping incapacitation. “I’ve tried not to be burdened by it,” he says. “I talk in the book about ‘carrying the elephant’.” Rosen hands me a postcard replica of an engraving of a man struggling to carry an elephant up a hill. “I bought that in Paris,” he goes on, “and it’s a great reminder. You know, I’m not carrying an elephant. At the time I thought I was. Eddie’s dead and I’m carrying all this grief and it’s bigger than me – it’s as big as an elephant. But not any more. Even with this Covid thing, or with any of that other stuff, I’m still not carrying an elephant. So this picture, it inspires me.”Then he risks a whole poem, a beaut. And a comment on the poem which is really scary: "This last bit means that I don't want to be here. I just want to disappear." Which rhymes, so it's really still a part of the poem.

When I first read this book, I was teaching a children's literature class. In that context, I loved it because it talked about emotions without pandering to kids, without being gooey or cutesy or saccharine.Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be,” Joan Didion wrote after losing the love of her life. “The people we most love do become a physical part of us,” Meghan O’Rourke observed in her magnificent memoir of loss, “ingrained in our synapses, in the pathways where memories are created.” Those wildly unexpected dimensions of grief and the synaptic traces of love are what celebrated British children’s book writer and poet Michael Rosen 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’s Sad Book ( public library) — an immensely moving addition to the finest children’s books about loss, illustrated by none other than the great Quentin Blake. Rosen’s poems for children always see the world from their perspective and can be counted on to induce giggles – “‘Don’t throw fruit at a computer’ / ‘You what?’” – especially when performed by the poet himself: he doesn’t have 98m YouTube views for nothing. He is learning to adapt to virtual school visits, “a kind of informal telly”, zooming into the camera with one eye: “then my dad came in and said ...” He has written more than 200 books and counting, including greedily devoured favourites Chocolate Cake, Fluff the Farting Fish and Monster. His most recent books for adults include The Missing, an investigation into the fates of his European Jewish relatives during the second world war, and his 2017 memoir So They Call You Pisher!, a lively account of growing up the son of Jewish communists in postwar Pinner: “Not the most encouraging place to start a branch of a political organisation aimed at world revolution.” Then there are the two books he wrote in response to the death of his second son Eddie (he has five children, including Eddie, and two stepchildren) from meningitis when he was 18 just over 20 years ago: Carrying the Elephant, a mixture of prose and poetry, and Michael Rosen’s Sad Book, illustrated by Blake. “I loved him very, very much,” Rosen writes, “but he died anyway.” Rosen likes to say he is ‘recovering’ rather than ‘recovered’. Covid has left him with a hearing aid in one ear, dizziness and breathlessness In the rest of the book Rosen explains how he copes – or doesn't cope – when he is in that "deep dark" place and feels sad. It's a deeply personal insight; but also universal. We feel sad with and for Rosen, and by extension with and for Quentin Blake, who has given the book such heartrending illustrations. I almost made it through Michael Rosen's Sad Book without getting sad, but then I got to the part where he explains that he often isn't thinking about anything sad, but then his mind will shift:

Things can never be the same, but some things help, says Rosen. Try to do one little good thing a day (perhaps cook a meal) or do some little thing you enjoy (perhaps catch a game on tv). Remember being sad is not being bad, but try not to make others unhappy.

Could you write your own ‘Sad Book’ that shares things that make you sad and how you deal with this… could you make a book about a different emotion that you feel? The remainder of the book discusses the different feelings that bereavement brings, and ways of coping with them including distracting oneself and expressing feelings through writing. It also describes how Rosen found his despair lifting and how he was able to deal with his grief and think about the good times he had with his son. [2] Reception [ edit ] Some experience or understanding of a loss or sadness would be required, however the emotions are raw enough in the book for an unfamiliar audience to empathise. It could therefore be linked to more whole-class books like Goodnight Mr Tom. We all have sad stuff - maybe you have some right now, as you read this. What makes Michael Rosen most sad is thinking about his son Eddie, who died. In this book, he writes about his sadness, how it affects him and some of the things he does to try to cope with it. This is a very personal story that speaks to everyone; whether or not you have known what it's like to feel really, deeply sad, it's truth will surely touch you." What follows is not a menu. It’s not a prescription. I know better than many that being told how to mourn is one of the most irritating things in the world. We each have to find our own ways of doing it. We can watch what others do, listen to what people say, but in the end we have to make it work for whoever we are and whatever life situation we’re in. And there’s another thing: by making it your own, you have the sense that it’s you doing it, you’re the “agent”. You can take pride in your own ability to do something in the face of the impossible. Just following someone else’s plan won’t do that for you.