Scenes with My Son
Love and Grief in the Wake of Suicide
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $21.99
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
A father's stirring and tender tribute to the son he lost to suicide
After years of battling clinical depression exacerbated by autism, Auggie Hubbard died by suicide at the age of 19. In this poignant tribute to his son, Robert Hubbard—a theatre scholar and actor—stages Auggie's life in a series of vivid and tender scenes: Auggie's insatiable hunger for Accelerated Reader points. His tireless lightsaber practice in the local park. His sonorous tuba practice in the ward of his inpatient program. Through these anecdotes of Auggie's life and the days following his death, readers journey with a family shaken by mental illness and share in their hard-won joys in defiance of depression.
Refusing easy answers and clichés about "God's plan," Hubbard unflinchingly asks: Does faith matter amid such tragedy? What do you do when awareness isn't enough? When you've tried so hard to keep your child safe, but your efforts fail? His honesty and vulnerability—and his tender portrait of Auggie—are gifts to all who live with their own questions in the wake of a loved one's death.
Foreword Reviews INDIES Book of the Year Award in Grief/Grieving Finalist (2023)
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Northwestern College theater professor Hubbard debuts with a haunting elegy to his late son, who died by suicide in 2020 at age 19 after enduring a tortuous five-year battle with depression. Initially unable to write about Auggie (even the social media updates Hubbard posted in the days immediately afterward were "a steaming hell"), the author eventually decided he needed "to let the world know about Auggie's great soul." He divides the book's vivid collage of vignettes into three acts: "Beautiful Boy" chronicles Auggie's childhood, which was "lived mostly in a state of joy," though occasional out-of-the-blue fits of rage "hinted at dangerous imbalances to come"; "The Family Monster" probes the depression that's afflicted the author's other son, George, and wife April; and "The Life After" captures the bewildering weeks and months that followed the tragedy, as the devoutly Christian author wrestled with his faith ("Adoring the God who allowed my son to die seems false or disingenuous at times," he muses at one point, and elsewhere wonders, "Will I really see my boy again? Or is my belief just a fairy tale?"). Hubbard holds nothing back in sketches that vacillate between gut-punching grief and passionate celebration of life—often in the same sentence, as when he relives "the sensation of how the house literally vibrated from the soulful, mournful, masterful bellows of Auggie playing his tuba." It's a heartbreaker.
