A stirring collection from one of the form's most widely praised innovators
How do we wrestle with unimaginable loss? How does love open us to new worlds and even new versions of ourselves? In The First 649 Days, Eric LeMay explores the everyday moments and momentous events that make and unmake our lives, from the birth of a child to mass death in a global pandemic to finding a home and comfort among the fields and forests of Appalachian Ohio.
Using forms as diverse as journal entries, cell phone texts, children’s picture books, and erasure poems, LeMay wrestles with questions of illness, isolation, identity, grief, family, and love because, like so many us, he’s had to live them. He was diagnosed with cancer in 2017 when his first child was a little over a year old. He learned during the worst month of the COVID-19 pandemic that his 80-year-old father, unable to breathe, had been admitted to the emergency room in the middle of the night. Would he live? And if not? In these richly varied essays, LeMay helps us make our way, personally and collectively, through experiences that may be our last, all the while honoring those “firsts”—the first cry, the first word, the first day of school.
With remarkable humor and candor, LeMay explores how we grieve, how we grow, and how the gardens we plant, the children we raise, and the words we share lead us more deeply into our own lives.