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After author Ann Hood's 5-year-old daughter, Grace, died from a virulent form of strep in 2002, Hood lost a primary source of solace: her ability to read and write. She would look at the page of a book, and the words made no sense. She couldn't write a sentence.
Grace's death was all the more traumatic because of its swiftness. She woke up one morning, semiconscious, with a fever that within a few hours spiked to 105. Thirty-six hours later, the little girl who loved to wear brightly colored outfits and who had a gift for drawing died in the hospital.
"For a year I was in such shock I don't remember conversations or even meeting people," Hood says. She would spend hours watching cooking shows on TV to numb her brain. Everything "was a blur of images and feelings. What I did or how I did it, it's gone. I guess that's a coping mechanism."
Eventually, she found something she could do: learn to knit. The clicking needles and soft, colorful yarns brought comfort. Mountains of scarves and hats piled up.
Gradually, Hood, 50, began writing again -- some essays about Grace and grieving, including a New York Times "Modern Love" piece last year on how much Grace loved The Beatles. In fall 2004 she began a novel about a woman whose daughter, Stella, 5, dies from meningitis. The woman struggles with her grief and finds solace, much like Hood, through knitting groups.
The Knitting Circle (Norton, $24.95) is being published this week. Hood has written seven other novels, including Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine.
Writing, like knitting, was a form of healing, and Hood needed to heal and to move on, for her own sake and that of her husband, Lorne Adrain, and their son, Sam, now 13.
The summer after Grace died, Hood and Adrain thought about having a baby. When Hood had trouble conceiving, they decided to adopt. In March 2005, they traveled to China, where they met their new daughter, Annabelle, and took her back home to Providence.
Annabelle will be 3 in April. Hood says she's very funny and very verbal. "Just what the doctor ordered," Hood says with a laugh.
Annabelle's actual birth date isn't known, but the adoption agency assigned her April 18, a particularly poignant day. "The day in April they gave her is the day that Grace died three years earlier." At first, Hood was shaken, but her husband assured her that it had to be a good sign.
"Despite the horrible loss of Grace, I think I'm happy and I'm lucky." But not a day passes that she doesn't think of Grace. "It's not something you ever get over. It's just something you live with, and you learn how to do that."
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