Once more we saw stars / A Memoir Jayson Greene.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

"A gripping and beautiful book about the power of love in the face of unimaginable loss."
--Cheryl Strayed

For readers of The Bright Hour and When Breath Becomes Air, a moving, transcendent memoir of loss and a stunning exploration of marriage in the wake of unimaginable grief.

As the book opens: two-year-old Greta Greene is sitting with her grandmother on a park bench on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. A brick crumbles from a windowsill overhead, striking her unconscious, and she is immediately rushed to the hospital. But although it begins with this event and with the anguish Jayson and his wife, Stacy, confront in the wake of their daughter's trauma and the hours leading up to her death, Once More We Saw Stars quickly becomes a narrative that is as much about hope and healing as it is about grief and loss. Jayson recognizes, even in the midst of his ordeal, that there will be a life for him beyond it--that if only he can continue moving forward, from one moment to the next, he will survive what seems unsurvivable. With raw honesty, deep emotion, and exquisite tenderness, he captures both the fragility of life and absoluteness of death, and most important of all, the unconquerable power of love. This is an unforgettable memoir of courage and transformation--and a book that will change the way you look at the world.

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

Excerpted from Once More We Saw Stars Ever since the accident, I have avoided going to the park. The park was our place, Greta's and mine -- every tree, every leaf, every passing doggy belonged to the two of us. Even within my cocoon of shock, I am sure going there would pierce my defenses, flooding me the way my first trip outside did after she died. And then, one day, just as the summer light is beginning to change, I wake up with a familiar itch.  I need to go running in the park. I step outside and feel only the warmth of the sun. I round the corner on the block that leads to the parade grounds, just outside the park's southwest entrance. The street is wide, quiet, shaded. There is no one outside, no one to nod at, make eye contact with, step around. I enter the parade grounds and run past fields full of children, my eyes fixed straight ahead. To my left, a middle-school football team is doing speed and endurance drills, dancing frantically on their toes and dropping down for push-ups. Two boys swing a bat lazily to my right, smacking a baseball into the same bulged-out spot on the chain-link. It hits the fence with a loud  bong  as I run past, but I do not flinch. I reach the edge of the park, tennis courts to my right. There at the park's mouth, my heart stirs, and I feel a peculiar elation.  I recognize her.  Greta is somewhere nearby. I feel her energy, playfully expectant.  Come find me, Daddy,  she says. Tears spring and run freely down my face.  I hear you, baby girl,  I whisper . Daddy's coming to get you . Elated, I enter the park and immediately spot her; she is waiting for me, hiding behind the big tree in the clearing between the Vanderbilt playground and the duck pond. She appears from behind the tree with a flourish, giggling, just like in our old game: She would run out into the hallway from the bedroom where we had been playing, either naked or in her diaper, and cast me an impish look, asking, "Where's Greta?" I would feign great perplexity, turning over small toys on the floor to see if she was under them, peeking behind the couch, clutching my head in mock terror. "Oh no, what have we done?" I would moan. "We've lost her!" She would laugh, run back in, and announce, "Greta came right back!" Standing in the park, staring at her, I make a strange and primal sound, deep and rich like a belly laugh, hard and sharp like a sob.  You are here. You picked the park. Good choice, baby girl.  Oblivious to the people around me, I run to her. She wiggles in anticipatory joy. Stooping down, I scoop her up under her soft armpits, her shoulder blades meeting at the pads of my fingers, and I lift her up into the sky. She is invisible to passersby -- to them, there is nothing in the spot next to the tree where she stands laughing and clapping but a patch of grass, and there is nothing in my arms but air. But she is not here for them; she is here for me. She gazes down at me, her smile that turned crooked at the bottom like mine crumpling her wide-open face. I bend my arms and lower her face down to mine and kiss her, slowly. Then I set her back down in the grass. You stay here, okay?  I say.  Daddy's going for a run, okay, sweetie pie? Oh yeah, okay!  she says back. I turn around and begin running hard along the perimeter of the pond, where we had dipped her hand in the water, splashing and saying, "Here we go, ducks! Here we go!" The playground recedes behind me, where I had pushed her on the swing while she sang, "Poopy, poopy, poopy poopy," to the tune of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" at the top of her lungs. "If my kid's saying 'poopy' tonight," the mother next to me deadpanned, "I'll know where he picked it up." I feel her presence filling up my heart, and with it comes a strange exhilaration that I have felt often in the weeks after her death. Grief at its peak has a terrible beauty to it, a blinding fission of every emotion. The world is charged with significance, with meaning, and the world around you, normally so solid and implacable, suddenly looks thin, translucent. I feel like I've discovered an opening. I don't know quite what's behind it yet. But it is there. I am treading ether, a new and unfamiliar kind of contact high. I have been raised secular by my parents, and I've never set foot in a church for more than an hour. But I will do anything for Greta, I am learning. And that includes becoming a mystic, so that I might still enjoy her company. When I reach the edge of the park again, I stop and feel a torrent of words flood me. I grope for my phone, blindly choosing the most recent document, a mess of to-dos and grocery lists. Underneath a reminder to pick up pita and above a confirmation number for a UPS delivery, I write, "There will be more light upon this earth for me." Excerpted from Once More We Saw Stars: A Memoir by Jayson Greene All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

Freelance journalist Greene struggles with the 2015 death of his daughter in this heart-wrenching yet life-affirming memoir. After two-year-old Greta was killed when a brick fell from an eighth-story windowsill in New York City and hit her on the head (also injuring his mother-in-law), Greene and his wife Stacy descended into despair and realized they must pass "through some magnificent, terrible threshold together." Grasping for solace, the couple attended a retreat at the Kripalu Center in Massachusetts, for people who have lost loved ones, which featured a medium and daily yoga sessions. Afterwards, back home, Greene, jogging through Central Park suddenly felt the world becoming "thin, translucent" and he sensed Greta's presence. Then, on what would have been their daughter's third birthday, they tried a New Age healing ceremony in New Mexico that took them on separate vision quests that allowed them to confront and be at peace with their grief. Their second child was born a year later, and Greene movingly writes of the joy he felt holding his newborn son along with the simultaneous metaphysical connection he experienced with Greta. The result is an amazing and inspirational exploration on the meaning of grief and the interconnectedness of love and loss. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

Journalist Greene went through perhaps the most horrifying experience possible for a parent and lived to tell about it in clear, richly detailed prose. The author's two-year-old daughter, Greta, was sitting on a bench outside a Manhattan building with her grandmother when a chunk of brick from a windowsill fell from the eighth floor and hit Greta's head. She was rushed to the hospital, where she was declared brain dead, leaving Greene and his wife, Stacy, to say goodbye while waiting for her organs to be donated. This gripping memoir follows the couple into and out of the depths of grief, through ordinary and less ordinary days, as suicidal despair alternates with howling anger at the universe, and as they make the fraught decision to try to have another child. Greene, remarkably, pays as much attention to the particulars of the people and places around him as he does to his own unsugarcoated experience of the tentative but real return of hope and pleasure in life.--Margaret Quamme Copyright 2019 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

A Brooklyn-based music journalist's account of his 2-year-old daughter's accidental death and his journey to acceptance of her passing.One day, Greene and his wife, Stacy, left Greta with her grandmother. Shockingly, a brick from an eighth-story windowsill fell on Greta's skull, causing irreversible brain damage. Overcome with grief and guilt for having "failed this little person so completely," the couple struggled to fit the shattered pieces of their life together again. "Grief at its peak has a terrible beauty to it," he writes, "a blinding fission of every emotion." A bitter rage made Greene hate the "unexamined happiness" of the peopleespecially parentshe saw around him while Stacy was forced to confront not only her own anguish, but that of her mother. After feeling Greta's presence in a local park, the author suddenly realized that "there will be more light upon this earth for me." He and Stacy began attending grief workshops, one of which included a medium who encouraged them to "pay attention to signs" from their loved ones. They also decided to leave the home where Greta "padd[ed] agreeably around every corner" and start a new lifecomplete with what they hoped would one day be another childelsewhere in the city. They took up yoga while Greene "became a prospector for safe screaming spaces" where he could release pent-up emotional suffering. After the couple discovered they were pregnant, they went to see a ceremonialist in New Mexico who they hoped would help them process Greta's death along with the impending birth of the son who would never know his sister. The powerful visions of death and rebirth they experienced helped them to understand and embrace the brokenness within themselves with love, grace, and gratitude. Compassionate and sensitively told, Greene's story accomplishes an exceptionally difficult feat: transforming tragedy into both a spiritual journey and a celebration of wonder.A poignantly uplifting memoir of moving forward after terrible loss. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.