The Loneliest Places: Loss, Grief, and the Long Journey Home

The essays of The Loneliest Places began as a chronicle of Rachel Dickinson’s life after her son’s suicide. The pieces became much more.

Dickinson writes the unimaginable and terrifying facts of heart-breaking loss. In The Loneliest Places she tells stories from her months on the run, fleeing her grief and herself, as she escapes to Iceland and the Falkland Islands―as far as possible from the memories of her dead son, Jack. She frankly relates the paralyzing emotion that sometimes left her trapped in her home, confined to a single chair, helplessly isolated.

The tales from these years are bleak, and Dickinson’s journey home, back to her changed self and fractured family, is lonely. Conjuring Emily Dickinson, she describes, though, how hope was sighted, allowed to perch, and then, remarkably, made actual.