Memento Vivere

Most grief memoirs shield the author. Memento Vivere does not. VerBeek sets down the night his fourteen-year-old son died by suicide without softening it or his own part in it: the shouting in the car, the "What did you take?" screamed over a sobbing boy, the forehead kiss that was "the last time I ever saw my son," and the Jeep keys left in the ignition. He then follows the grief as it actually behaves, not as a tidy arc. He punches through drywall, runs the street at 3 a.m. cursing God, and sees a blue orb he believes is Max, while admitting that "grief has a way of blurring the line between revelation and delusion." Mania, a Change.org petition and a website drawing thousands of visitors a day then turn mourning into crusade, and he judges it himself: "I was becoming a monster of my own making."

The substance is the willingness to implicate himself. Bipolar disorder, alcoholism, Lindy's death, a collapsing marriage and a childhood in a yellow wagon with a "Dusty" license plate all feed the same question of how to keep living. The title becomes earned rather than decorative when he admits that after tattooing memento vivere on his forearm he "stopped living again." The closing documents (the school-board letter, the sheriff's letter, the dated letters to Max) are the book's evidence. They show a father turning private anguish into policy asks, and they carry the weight of a man who means every line.