How to Survive Losing a Child

I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be my wife, Danielle Crittenden Frum, and we’ll be discussing her new book about the loss of our daughter, Dispatches From Grief: A Mother’s Journey Through the Unthinkable.Because of the personal and sensitive nature of this discussion, I’m not going to do a book this week. I’m not going to do a preliminary introduction. I’m just gonna say how grateful I am to Danielle that she would join me today. And now my dialogue with my wife, Danielle Crittenden Frum.[Music]Frum: Danielle Crittenden and I met on June 13, 1987. We were married a year later. Then we were married again in 1991 in a religious ceremony after Danielle’s conversion to Judaism. Our first child, Miranda, was born on July 26, 1991, in New York City. Miranda died suddenly in February of 2024 at age 32.That death and its aftermath are together the subject matter of Danielle’s new book, Dispatches From Grief: A Mother’s Journey Through the Unthinkable, published by Infinite Books on May 5.I usually keep these introductions brief, but I will make an exception here to say a little more about Miranda and Danielle.Miranda lived an adventurous life—from a parent’s point of view, often a hair-raisingly adventurous life. She left university after a single semester. She worked as a television producer in Toronto, then moved to Israel, where she was discovered as a fashion model. She posed for advertisements and walked runways in Europe and Japan, and came under Hamas rocket fire in Tel Aviv in the summer of 2014. In the fall of 2018, she was diagnosed with a deadly brain tumor and un