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from saturday's books section

Roger Rosenblatt, with grandson

Negotiating my way through U.S. Customs recently after a visit to NBC, I faced a guard incensed with that network's programming: "Oprah Winfrey's done more damage than anyone on TV. Everybody's crying all the time." He waved me away. "People should just SUCK IT UP." He would approve of the emotional minimalism of this small memoir.

But the problem with suppression - besides the psychological toll - is that it doesn't go far to elucidate the human condition. When death happens, or love, for that matter, we look to the literary to divine our souls.





"In some ways, I wish he and I could talk about emotional matters as effectively as we joke with each other," author and playwright Roger Rosenblatt says of his son-in-law, after the woman they share as daughter and wife dies suddenly. "Given the choice between confessions of sorrow, however cathartic, and the simplest act of getting on with it, we'll get on with it." The grocery list of how - feeding and dressing grandchildren, shuttling them to dance, sports and music lessons, playing with toys again - while personally restorative for the author, is too often unenlightening tedium for the reader.

Not that the poignant is lacking: A beloved pediatrician and mother of three picks out a Christmas tree in the morning and drops dead in front of her toddlers in the afternoon. Amy Elizabeth Rosenblatt Solomon was just 38 and exercising on her treadmill when she was squeezed to death by an "an anomalous right coronary artery," a terrorist sleeper deformity waiting in the wings.









Rosenblatt writes, "Her condition, affecting less than two thousandths of one per cent of the population, was asymptomatic; she might have died at any time."

When Amy dies, she leaves behind three little lives - six-year-old Jessica, four-year-old Sammy and baby James, just 1. Fortunately, also surviving with open arms are Rosenblatt and his schoolteacher wife, Ginny, who immediately move into the family home and, together with young widower Harris, re-create the extended family of the past.

And thank God for the children, even in this "non-religious" home, for they dare to say what adults have learned not to, and demand from life what their elders long ago surrendered. Little James was only beginning to speak, so when he suddenly weeps, "When is Mommy coming home?" Rosenblatt wonders, "All this time, has he been thinking she was simply away?"

We see the toll as Sammy falls to the floor, his tongue lolling from his head, a graphic reminder of his mother's death scraped on his psyche. And we ache at the children's need when one dreams of becoming an inventor so he can make a device that helps people see the invisible - "like ultraviolet rays … and Mommy."

These are wise choices for a writing teacher who finds it difficult to paint his inner life. Other inclusions are not as valuable: For instance, the prolonged lists of people who helped reads more like a convenient thank-you note than a book. Our own practical details are never as interesting to others.

We all cope in different ways, of course, and Rosenblatt's frugality marks a counterpoint to today's sometimes exploitive emotional excesses. He does admit to anger, and that he "seethed" at those who used "clichés" such as "passing" and "closure" in a bid to help, and "cursed" a God he believes does not care. After 46 years of marriage, he begins finally, he says, to know his wife, tracing a map of tragedy to her core.

Nevertheless, this is a scant diary, often recorded in an emotional monotone, documenting one man's bid to survive when a grief he will not speak threatens to capsize him. "Except for a few disappointments, probably less than my share, I've led a charmed life. I am learning what most people know at a much younger age - that life is to be endured, and its rewards earned."

Paula Todd is an author and an investigative journalist with CTV's W5.

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