Falling
A Daughter, a Father, and a Journey Back
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Elisha Cooper spends his mornings creating children’s books and his afternoons playing with his two daughters. But when he discovers a lump in five-year-old Zoë’s midsection as she sits on his lap at a Chicago Cubs game, everything changes. Surgery, sleepless nights, months of treatment, a drumbeat of worry. Even as the family moves to New York and Zoë starts kindergarten, they must navigate a new normal: school and soccer and hot chocolate at the local café, interrupted by anxious visits to the hospital. Elisha and his wife strive to help their daughters maintain a sense of stability and joy in their family life. And he tries to understand this new world—how it changes art and language and laughter—as he holds on to the protective love he feels for his child.
With the observant eye of an artist and a remarkable sense of humor, Elisha captures his family’s journey through a perilous time and, in the process, shows how we are all transformed by the fear and hope we feel for those we love
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Children's book author Cooper (Train) takes the grimmest of subject matters learning that your young daughter has cancer and turns it into a poignant but never melodramatic musing on parenting, love, and risks in this slim memoir that packs a mighty punch. The lives of Cooper and his wife, Elise, suddenly shift into warp speed when Cooper feels a lump on four-year-old Zo 's side when she's sitting on his lap during a Cubs game. It's a pediatric kidney cancer called Wilms's tumor, a so-called "good cancer." But after surgery, the doctors tell Cooper and Elise that Zo 's is stage three. Twenty-two weeks of chemo follow, during which the stoic Zo bonds with nurses, stuffed tiger clutched in her hand, while Cooper spins in a silent rage that bursts forth at inopportune moments. Cooper, Elise, Zo , and youngest daughter Mia move from Chicago to New York and develop a ritual around Zo , now in kindergarten, going for treatment every Friday. Cooper tells of the blanket of normalcy that descends, but still, "every week has a Friday." Zo is on the mend, and post-treatment scans show no recurrence, yet Cooper still struggles to reconcile the fierce love he feels for his daughter, his need to protect her, and the powerlessness he feels in the face of cancer. This tale of fatherly devotion is also a story of discovering what it means to survive in the face of the unknowable.
