What Remains: A Memoir of Fate, Friendship, and Love by Carole Radziwill

My father died suddenly the summer of 2016, the same summer I started working at a hospice. I was running a grief camp for children who had lost a parent. My dad would call this bad writing. Too on the nose. Nobody would believe it.  How was my timing so off that these two events were happening the same summer? Well, unfortunately, we do not get to choose when to experience grief, rather it comes upon us like a giant tidal wave of uncomfortable, relentless emotion. Whenever I think of overwhelming grief, I come back to this beautifully written book, "What Remains: A Memoir of Fate, Friendship and Love" by Carole Radziwill. Carole was married to Anthony Radziwill, the son of Jacqueline Kennedy Onasis’ sister Lee Radziwill. Carole was a journalist when she met, and later married Anthony, who was a television executive and filmmaker. She grew up middle class, while he was a member of the House of Radziwill, a Polish noble dynasty. Carole and her husband, who married in 1994, were extremely close with his first cousin John F Kennedy Jr., and his wife Carolyn Bessette. In July 1999, a small plane piloted by Kennedy, carrying Carolyn and her sister Laura, went down in the ocean. They were traveling to the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port to celebrate the wedding of his cousin Rory when the plane disappeared from the horizon. Three weeks later, Carole's husband Anthony died of cancer, after treatment for his disease failed. Such young people. Such unimaginable grief. Such horror. Carole’s life began as a fairy tale, but later plunged into a period of darkness and alienation. However, she did not crumble, but rather learned to manager her grief by writing about it. It is a testament to her skill as a writer and journalist that she was able to publish a book 17 years ago, and it has stayed with me ever since. To buy this book on Amazon click here.