Michael Rosen's Sad Book

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So I offer you what I did as a set of things to think about, ignore, adapt, change, or do what you want with. I hope they give you ideas for what you might want to do if you’re faced with loss or grief. Just that. If a child is to *touch wood* experience loss in my class I will 100% be sharing this with them. It is such an important book and should be read by people of all ages.

Rosen said that the book arose after a group of children asked him questions about his son's death and they were able to discuss it in a "matter-of-fact" way. [2] It begins with a picture of Rosen looking happy, with text explaining that he is sad and only pretending to be happy. The book frequently uses a disconnection between text and image to communicate the complex feelings of grief. [3] Blake, who has previously illustrated Sylvia Plath’s little-known children’s book and many of Roald Dahl’s stories, brings his unmistakably expressive sensibility to the book, here and there concretizing Rosen’s abstract words into visual vignettes that make you wonder what losses of his own he is holding in the mind’s eye as he draws. A drawing of a rainbow and several bears placed in a window for children to ‘hunt’, in Edinburgh, March 2020. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

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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: I wonder aloud why he has never previously told the story of Eddie’s death. Given what I’ve been through, I’ve done OK. If you were to mark it in terms of difficulty, I’m about a five Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2021-07-10 06:01:11 Associated-names Blake, Quentin Boxid IA40171218 Camera Sony Alpha-A6300 (Control) Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier 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. Within moments, as I remember it now, the chatter around the table, the warming laughter and chinking glasses, disappeared. Sad Book is instantly overwhelming.

Many of us read books more than once. We read at different times in our lives. We read books in different ways. The ambulance people call, I let them in, they dash upstairs, their bulky uniforms filling the space. They kneel over Eddie, and in a few seconds, one of them says, “He’s dead.” Every day I try to do one thing that means I have a good time. It can be anything so long as it doesn’t make anyone else unhappy.”Someone’s sent me a book of riddles that’s just come out. I’ve got it because a riddle I’ve written is in the book. I read it to him. He gets it. It’s daft. The answer, he says, is “your bum”. Those are the last words that I ever heard him say. It's central to what he's talking about. He mentions it right at the beginning of the story, saying he's sad a lot because his boy is dead. He wishes he could talk to his mom about it, but she's dead too. Rosen is more sorry about than for himself. He wishes his family need not see him in an abject state. He worries about their feelings. “I am sorry this is me.” Just a couple days ago, I brought out this book to read it to my boy. Most of what I remembered about the book is that it was touching and honest. I thought it would be a good stepping off point that I could use to have a discussion with my boy.

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. I notice on Rosen’s desk an unframed photograph of a young man. Rosen swivels to look. “That’s him,” he says, “not all that long before he died.” I don’t remember the next few minutes. I remember at one point thinking or saying, “Why have you done this, Eddie?” as if he had done this thing to me. I’m almost ashamed to admit it, though. Why or how could I have thought at that moment that I was in any way involved in him getting whatever it was that had killed him? I guess it’s part of how we see the death of those we love: we see them withdrawing their love from us. If ever, in our past, people withdrew their love from us as some kind of punishment, then someone dying can feel like that too.His new collection of prose poems, Many Different Kinds of Love, with drawings by Chris Riddell, is his attempt to make sense of those missing weeks last year: “It’s just gone. You can’t quite deal with it.” He felt as if he was in a “portal”: his hospital bed liminal, like the train in Harry Potter or the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland, he says, his body “an unreliable narrator”. It is about “what it feels like to be seriously ill, what it feels like to nearly die, and what does recovery mean?” He likes to say that he is “recovering” rather than “recovered”. Covid has left him with “drainpipes” (Xen tubes) in his eyes, a hearing aid in one ear, missing toenails, a strange sandiness to his skin and he suffers from dizziness, breathlessness and “everything gets a bit fuzzy every now and then”. Can you think of different words / phrases that describe emotions? In the book, the author describes ‘sad’ as ‘big, everywhere, all over me’. He also says that sad is ‘just a cloud that comes along and covers me up’.