Alison Garwood Jones

Last year, in the lead up to Mother’s Day I created a grief survey and asked orphaned adults to share what they do on Mother’s Day now that she’s gone. Here’s what you said:

• I avoid church, restaurants and garden centres

• I play her favourite songs

• I hang out with my siblings and trade memories

• I avoid my siblings

• I drink

• I cook her best dishes

• I go for a nice long walk in nature

Then I asked for your best coping mechanisms:

• I work out (it metabolizes grief)

• I journal (to surface good memories and reframe bad ones)

• I talk to someone (a spouse, a friend, a therapist, my dog)

• I go back to bed

Several pointed to our culture’s recent spiritual reframing of grief as a form of unexpressed love. Thank you, Andrew Garfield and Marisa Renée Lee, author of Grief Is Love for helping to change the angle of our lens on loss.

Finally I asked, if you could tell your mother one last thing what would it be?

• “I’m doing okay.”

• “I miss you terribly.”

• “Come back.”

• “You made me who I am.”

• “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

I took all of these emotions and put them in my new illustrated novel about grief called, I MISS MY MOMMY.

It shows a series of 150 portraits of orphaned adults, most of them Gen X’ers, trying to figure out how to “do life” without their folks.

I wanted to show what grief looks like day-to-day and how we learn to live with it, even thrive, in moments of hope and renewed energy. The result is grim, funny, relatable, and hopeful.

These are “stories we need,” said Kirkus Reviews in a Spotlight of the book published yesterday in their April 15 issue of Kirkus Reviews Magazine. Thank you, Kirkus Media.

Make I MISS MY MOMMY your source of comfort this Mother’s Day.

SHOP: PenJarProductions

Printed and shipped with care by Lulu Press, Inc.