Writer’s Digest 2023 Self-Published Book Awards Honorable Mention
Independent Author Network 2023 Book of the Year Finalist
in Two Categories: Grief/Hardship
and Women’s Non-Fiction
Mom’s Search for Meaning:
Grief and Growth After Child Loss
by Melissa M. Monroe
“This book is exemplary in its voice and writing style. Melissa Monroe has poured her heart into Mom’s Search for Meaning, her memoir about losing her second child who died in her sleep as a toddler. With a strong and personal voice Monroe shares the impact this devastating loss has had on her life and what tools she has used to cope with grief and PTSD including EMDR and acupuncture. With curiosity and honesty she invites the reader on the journey she needed to take to find the strength to survive her new normal. “It’s simply exhausting to force yourself to live on Earth day after day when one of your children is no longer bound by its gravity,” she writes. Monroe is dogged in locating the resources and support she needs and generously shares those throughout the pages of Mom’s Search for Meaning along with tools for grieving readers and readers who have loved ones enduring grief.”
—Judge, 31st Annual Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Awards
“Libraries and readers will find this memoir, more than others, opens floodgates of emotional responses and discussion points that ideally will attract book clubs, recovery groups, and psychology participants in a dialogue about motherhood, grief, validation, and support systems, and, most of all, that ‘thing with wings,’ hope.”
— D. Donovan, Senior Reviewer, Midwest Book Review
Synopsis:
Paralyzed by guilt, grief, and PTSD after her 2-year-old daughter Alice died in her sleep of unknown causes, acupuncturist Melissa Monroe determined not to become a victim in the story of her life. While taking the advice she had given to many grief and trauma patients throughout the years, hoping she could create a meaningful life without closure, she took notes throughout her healing process.
Struggling to advance her timeline beyond that of her daughter’s – and still eager to be the keeper of Alice’s stories – Melissa began to write about Alice’s life and the impact of her death. She became her own lab rat, trying various approaches to healing with the hope that her experience might be helpful to others stuck in a trauma time loop.
As much a study of trauma’s effect on time perception as it is an intimate view into the heart and mind of a bereaved mother, “Mom’s Search for Meaning” shows us that meaning resides in the search itself … with a spoonful of gallows humor to help the medicine go down.
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