A Story of Love, Loss, and Life After DeathSukey Forbes
Praise for THE ANGEL IN MY POCKET
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“Powerful, uplifting and fearless.”
—Chicago Tribune
“There is a unique and lovely energy underlying this book—one that stems from Forbes’s extended meditation on where Charlotte lands after her death. Forbes’s achievement in this book is that her engagement with ‘the other side’ is thoughtful and, yes, persuasive. Forbes has written a complex story of love and grief in which she comes to live with hope and faith.”
—Boston Globe
“Forbes turned to the wisdom of her ancestors . . . but it wasn’t until she took a friend’s advice to see a medium that she began to accept Charlotte’s passing as a form of spiritual transition and understand
the depth of her connection to the Emersonian part of her heritage.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“What do we do when the unthinkable happens? We have choices, of course. We can break, become tough, allow cynicism to seep into all our broken places. Or, as Sukey Forbes illustrates in this remarkable book, grief can kick the door wide open and let the light in. The Angel in My Pocket is a devastating and beautiful paean to the human spirit.”
—Dani Shapiro, bestselling author of Devotion, Still Writing, and Slow Motion
“If your life has ever come to a halt, if you have wondered how to want to live again, if you are looking for hope and longing for courage in the face of grief, if you seek staunch honesty and are keen to hear it from someone who knows firsthand that privilege does not protect you from pain, read this book and know that you are not alone.”
—Laura Munson, New York Times bestselling author of This is Not the Story You Think It Is
“How do we bear the unbearable? In this heartbreaking book, a bereaved mother offers
an unflinching account of the different ways we grieve and the different—and surprising—ways we may begin to heal.”
—George Howe Colt, author of The Big House
Now available in paperback, THE ANGEL IN MY POCKET: A Story of Love, Loss, and Life After Death, (Penguin; On sale May 19, 2015; 9780143127574; $16.00) by Sukey Forbes, is the profoundly moving and inspiring story of a mother’s unconventional path to healing after the death of her young daughter. Told with unflinching honesty and hard-won wisdom, Forbes’s memoir is a powerful story of one woman’s decision to embrace life in the face of tragic loss. With open-minded skepticism and a tenacious determination, Forbes seeks answers to questions such as “where did she go?” and “How do I go on?” Her story is a must read for anyone for whom life has taken a turn that left them unsure of how or even if they could move forward.
When Forbes lost her six-year-old daughter, to a rare genetic disorder, life as she knew it was shattered. She was aware that the true essence of what made Charlotte “Charlotte” had left her body. But where did it go? Surely all of this light and exuberance could not just cease when her heart stopped beating. Even as she was devastated by her loss, Forbes accepted that her own life was not over, and she searched for a way to both come toterms with this death and find her way back to a full, meaningful life. The door to both of these paths opened when Forbes found a prominent medium who helped her connect with Charlotte on the other side. With the medium’s help, Forbes found reassurance that Charlotte was not truly gone, but rather on a different part of the continuum of life and death. These experiences gave Forbes the comfort and peace she needed to march once more into life, aware of all it might hold in store for her. In the wake of their loss, she was determined not to just survive, but to thrive.
THE ANGEL IN MY POCKET details Forbes’s resilient journey from despair to a state of grace. Forbes’s family traditions played a strong, if contradictory, role in how she processed her daughter’s death. As the descendant of two of New England’s oldest and most distinguished families (one of which includes Ralph Waldo Emerson, her great-great-great grandfather), Forbes was raised in a rarefied world of privilege that valued emotional reserve and strict self-reliance. There was also, however, a widespread belief in ghosts—especially those that haunt Naushon Island, a 6,000-acre family property off Cape Cod that has remained largely unchanged since its purchase by her family in 1843. The island is filled with history, artifacts, and the visible presence of departed ancestors. With the customary guarded skepticism that defined much of her WASP upbringing, Forbes’s launches into explorations of mediums, religions, science, and philosophy balanced with sitting quietly and listening to the “wise silence” within to find meaning.
Forbes found further kinship with the philosophies of Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose son—like Charlotte—died at the age of six. Buoyed by the revelation that her family was as spiritually eccentric as it was stoic and reserved, Forbes became determined to break through her conditioned responses and embrace the complexities of her heritage.
THE ANGEL IN MY POCKET is an empowering and enlightening story that provides hope to the reader. It is one woman’s complicated and uncommon route to embracing the gifts of loss along with the sorrow. Forbes is heir to a lost American spiritual tradition that allowed her to look optimistically at life in the face of death. Like The Still Point of the Turning World and Proof of Heaven, Forbes’s story offers hope and help to anyone who is grieving the loss of a loved one or whose life has taken a turn that left them unsure of how or even if they could move forward.
About the Author
Sukey Forbes is the founder and president of an art and collectibles company and a blogger for The Huffington Post. The Angel in My Pocket is her first book. She lectures on positive grief and embracing life after loss. She has been interviewed and/or featured on ABC, WGBH, NPR, LA Talk Radio, Open to Hope, Worth Magazine, Boston Magazine and eHarmony (partial list). She and her family split their time between Boston, MA, and San Francisco, CA. Please visit the author on the web at, http://sukeyforbes.com/ https://twitter.com/sukeyforbes
