What We Lose

“An orphan was always a person without parents, without roots. I had one parent, and one was not none.”

This is a coming-of-age story about a young African-American woman, Thandi, who just lost her mother. The story covers more than just grief, bereavement and mourning. There is love, family dynamics, deep friendships and more. We see her struggle with her identity as a white-passing black girl in Pennsylvania and her efforts to stay connected with her roots in Johannesburg. I loved her friendship with Aminah and how it grew over the years. Thandi's relationship with her father was not the easiest and it is portrayed quite honestly. I liked it overall, highly recommend!

What We Lose reads like a collection of essays and vignettes, but together, they form a coherent story of someone who loses her home—only in this case, home is not a place, but a person. What does life look like when you become homeless (personless, motherless)? What do the fragments of this homeless life say about a life as a whole?

(originally published on inthemargins.ca)

I know I've been reading a lot of things that involve death and grief and other kinds of loss and processing complicated feelings lately, but I swear I didn't remember that What We Lose was about these things when I downloaded the audiobook. I ran out of podcast episodes to listen to while I was doing some design work, and so I looked for the shortest audiobook that was available immediately on my library list, and this was it, at 3 hours and 47 minutes.

The narrator was fantastic. I even listened to the whole thing at regular speed! I just wanted to savor the words, and the long pauses between each chapter (and I know from reading reviews afterward that each break indicated a new chapter), and how Thandi grew and developed and handled the devastation of her mother's death, both the days as she succumbed to her illness and what came after. But there's so much more to this book than just grieving loss (death and otherwise), there's romantic relationships and friendship and multiculturalism.

I thought this small tome was so beautiful and so powerful. Introspective. I almost don't want to say anything else about it.

TW: cancer, abortion