Hundert Tage Trauerarbeit: wie lebt man mit einem Kindsverlust?
One hundred days of grieving: how do you live with the loss of a child?
Over the course of one hundred days, the author tried to write down what there are actually no words for. The result is a massive, eloquent document of the first period of grief. The book tells of the time with the child, of the time after his death, of continuing to live with his twin brother, and - in the search for anchors and artifacts from the time with and before the children - goes into unsparingly autobiographical areas.
"We were walking through the cemetery park and the woman with the notepad said little, which was somehow good. "We're doing all this for the first time". This grotesque sentence was stuck in my head. I didn't say it, I didn't really feel helpless, I just didn't know how to bury someone, but I had a very strong feeling inside me that it had to be good. By that I meant various facets of everything to do with death and what you do for the dead that were not yet so clear to me. The place we were walking in was beautiful in a gentle way, which irritated me while I was feeling this way, as it is not a place we should be in right now. But we very quickly realized what we wanted here for Karl now, what we unfortunately had to want: a place that suited him."
(from: Martin Hiller - "Mrs. Elster and the embroidered whale")