My choice for reading during my most recent bout of down time was Judy Mandel’s Replacement Child
. Published in March, 2013 by Seal Press, the book is a memoir about her family’s healing journey following the crash of American Airlines flight 6780 in Elizabeth, NJ, on January 22, 1952. The crash resulted in the death of her older sister, Donna, and severe injury to her sister, Linda.
Numerous things about this book touched me deeply. It is a very honest account of life in a family where the first child has been lost and another child is conceived as an attempt to help heal the parents–an a look at the impact this has on the child. It is also a searingly honest account of the impact of withholding the truth from key events and information from a child, about what happens when children are exposed to that information via secondhand sources, etc.
The most powerful thing about this narrative for me, though, was the portrayal of the sibling relationship between Judy and her surviving sister. Reading about her learned protectiveness toward her sister and how this manifested in her behavior toward other children who stared at her sister’s scars was very potent for me as I remembered my own sister’s reactions to people staring at me and making comments about my blindness when we were children. Reading about Judy’s experience as a child having eye surgery and her feelings about being left at the hospital instead of having her parents stay with her made me wonder about my sister’s reactions to her own medical situations as she grew up… Eerily, we are the same number of years apart as Judy and her sister.
This memoir was clearly undertaken for very personal reasons, and it ends on a note indicating that the author feels she has accomplished what she set out to accomplish. There is no other way that it could have ended. As a writer myself, I empathize and sense that it was a very painful journey for her. I also see that she maintains a web site where she speaks more about related matters in a way that is directed to the public (e.g. posts about the process of memoir writing, posts about the crash history, posts about replacement child syndrome, etc.) I am glad to see the additional perspective.
Replacement Child is a book I recommend reading. It kept me well engaged. It is not syrupy, and there are no platitudes. In fact, perhaps its most important quality is the “real” struggle that can be seen between despair and anger toward God and the need to cling to the practice of faith–the Mandel family is Jewish. The loss of one child continues to affect the family for years to come. Only a choice to heal actively can free a person from such devastation… As we can see here, it is a choice that each person must make individually, though that person’s choice will continue to affect others in the future.
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