Willower: Rewriting Life After Unimaginable Loss

On April 30, 2007, Deanna Kassenoff experienced a parent's worst nightmare when her nine-year-old son, Sam, collapsed on the playground at school and died from sudden cardiac arrest. Drowning in grief, considering ways to end her own life, Deanna was faced with a choice: give up or rewrite her story, one with a different ending.

Willower is a book about using the power of story and imagination to survive the unimaginable. It is the story of a bereaved mother's urgent quest to find a way to stay connected with her beautiful boy. Deanna Kassenoff's memoir takes us into an unfathomable world of the most profound and permanently disorienting experiences: the sudden death of a child. Determined to find meaning in the details of her son's life, Deanna shows us how it is sometimes our lunacy that pulls us through grief back to living again. Written with stunning honesty, intensity, and eloquence, Willower is an unforgettable and heartbreaking demonstration of the endurance it takes to grieve and the courage it takes to live. This thoughtful and lyrical narrative will change you and stay with you forever.

We use the words widow, widower, and orphan, but there is no word in our vocabulary that identifies the bereaved parent. So, Deanna coined the term willower(R). From the words willow, a weeping tree that symbolizes deep mourning; and willpower, that creative source within that provides the superhuman strength and determination it takes to continue on-despite unimaginable loss.