Review | ‘Mourning Sickness’: Tara McGuire writes in debut memoir about grief after her son Holden dies from an overdose

Grief electrifies “Holden After & Before.” Composed of fearsome, volatile particles — disbelief, anger, shock, doubt, regret, guilt, anguish, depression, sadness — grief pulses and surges. In first-time author Tara McGuire’s experience, grief appears to subside but returns in an absolute fury. It is maddening and overwhelming, a primal force.

McGuire knows its facets well because her twenty-one-year-old son Holden died as a result of a drug overdose in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Devastated and undone by the death, McGuire tumbled into a housebound “mourning sickness,” that “came rampaging in, full throttle, like a bomber on a midnight raid.” She later strived to reason through the tragedy. Even then, she proved no match for the death and its psychological fallout:

“There is no way to make sense of Holden’s gaping absence. But I have too much love left unspent to let him be. So I dig. I assume and I sleuth and I speculate and I make phone calls. I close my eyes and wonder where it all began. I obsess. I think too much, and loop back, and zigzag like a hound on a scent. At times I see it all as if I were there.”

Weaving past and present “Holden After & Before” lays out McGuire’s complicated relationship with her son and recounts his short, bumpy history. Though artistic and bright, Holden felt flummoxed when his parents divorced. Depressed and anxious, he later struggled to hold jobs.

A former radio DJ, McGuire intervened. Or, she gave her son — “an ache, wrapped in a tough guy, wrapped in a comedian” — his space, hopeful that a loving child who could also be erratic, reckless, uncommunicative and prone to alcohol overconsumption would eventually find his balance. McGuire thought as much when her own employment ceased and she decided she would travel the world with her daughter and new husband. She was unaware that her son had begun to use heroin.

McGuire intersperses her account with third-person passages. Imaginative (“I guessed at a lot of it, at most of it,” she states), the scenes recreate parts of Holden’s life that were closed to her — hanging out with skate park friends, quarrelling with a girlfriend, the night of his death. Questionable as a truth-revealing strategy or dramatic re-enactments, these episodes — “a composite year based on slim threads” — are indicative of McGuire’s urge for answers.

Whether playing detective or consulting psychics, McGuire “relived every parental wrong” she believed she had committed. And: “None of the rights.” A portrait of one mother’s arduous grieving process — “Neither grief nor memory walked a straight line. A bad day, a better day, a terrible day. More and more they created their own weather” — “Holden” is a harrowing testimonial about a wound that cannot heal.

“I am not ashamed of my son,” McGuire writes as her book — a direct product of experience — draws to a close. “I am ashamed that I didn’t know what to do or how to help him.” For readers, there is pain to share and vital wisdom — about caring, listening, and loving — to store for future use.

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