It’s a perfect example of how grief displays itself differently for every individual. Rosalie Lightning is one of the most difficult books I’ve ever read not only because I have a young daughter in similar age to Rosalie at the time of her passing, but because so much grief went into putting it on paper that it’s hard to imagine the difficulty that Hart went through doing so. When something like this happens to someone close to you all you can mutter is “I could never imagine” and you can’t.

He answers this question several times, in several different ways, even though it’s a question that only could be answered by those who have lost a child. What do you do when you lose a child? Hart asks. They thought Florida would surely be better for them, but then they lost Rosalie. How they struggled for a time to sell the apartment that once brought them joy but then only brought them frustration. Hart tells the story of their lives with Rosalie, how they narrowly escaped New York for the artistic Gainesville, Florida. Instead Rosalie is filled with Tom and Leela’s life post-Rosalie and how they deal with her passing and the effects it has on their own selves. Sometimes stories like this tend to dwell on the morbid details of how something so horrific came to be, but Hart manages to avoid this.

And while the memoir does focus on how Rosalie came to pass, Hart makes sure to focus on the most important aspect of the story which is preserving the memory of his daughter. What Rosalie Lightning means to do is the tell the story of how Tom and his partner Leela came to lose their only child. At the time that sentence encapsulated how I felt, but by the time I would finish the memoir, the feeling would resonate much too closely to my own heart. When I finally did I said: because if Tom Hart is brave enough to write this story, I should be brave enough to read it.

I sat there for a minute before responding. Her response was to ask why in the hell would I want to read that. She asked what I was going to do while she napped and my response was “probably some laundry, maybe the dishes, but I’m going to read this graphic memoir about a guy who loses his two year old daughter”. My wife was going to take a nap while our two year old daughter also napped.

It was a mild winter afternoon when I sat down to read Rosalie Lightning.

Rosalie Lightning by Tom Hart