Making Toast: A Family Story »

Roger Rosenblatt's essays for Time magazine and PBS have won two George Polk Awards, the Peabody, and the Emmy. He is the author of six Off-Broadway plays and thirteen books, including the national bestseller Rules for Aging and Children of War, which won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has written two satirical novels, Beet and Lapham Rising, also a national bestseller. In 2008 he was appointed Distinguished Professor of English and Writing at Stony Brook University.

"How long are you staying, Boppo?"

"Forever."

When his daughter, Amy—a gifted doctor, mother, and wife—collapses and dies from an asymptomatic heart condition, Roger Rosenblatt and his wife, Ginny, leave their home on the South Shore of Long Island to move in with their son-in-law, Harris, and their three young grandchildren: six-year-old Jessica, four-year-old Sammy, and one-year-old James, known as Bubbies. Long past the years of diapers, homework, and recitals, Roger and Ginny—Boppo and Mimi to the kids—quickly reaccustom themselves to the world of small children: bedtime stories, talking toys, playdates, nonstop questions, and nonsequential thought. Though reeling from Amy's death they carry on, reconstructing a family, sustaining one another, and guiding three lively, alert, and tender-hearted children through the pains and confusions of grief. As he marvels at the strength of his son-in-law, a surgeon, and the tenacity and skill of his wife, a former kindergarten teacher, Roger attends each day to "the one household duty I have mastered"—preparing the morning toast perfectly to each child's liking.

With the wit, heart, precision, and depth of understanding that has characterized his work, Roger Rosenblatt peels back the layers on this most personal of losses to create both a tribute to his late daughter and a testament to familial love. The day Amy died, Harris told Ginny and Roger, "It's impossible." Roger's story tells how a family makes the possible of the impossible.

The Barnes & Noble Review

On December 8, 2007, Roger Rosenblatt's 38-year-old daughter, Amy, collapsed while running on her treadmill in her Bethesda, Maryland, home. The two eldest of her three children, ages 6, 4 and 1, were playing nearby and ran for help. Amy's husband, a hand surgeon, rushed to her and performed CPR, but it was too late. Amy -- mother, daughter, sister, friend, doctor -- had died instantly of a heart defect she hadn't known she had. What happened in the months following this unimaginable event, how a family reassembles itself after a devastating loss and moves on, is the subject of Rosenblatt's spare, moving book Making Toast. And while Rosenblatt's story, which originally appeared as an essay in the New Yorker, is deeply sad -- about 20 pages in, I had to put the book down and hunt down a box of Kleenex -- it is never sentimental. Neither is it angry.

Convinced of the meaninglessness of Amy's death, Rosenblatt, who calls himself "nonreligious," doesn't go looking for big answers. Instead, he seeks a way to get through each day -- and to help his suddenly motherless grandchildren make it through as well. He and his wife, Ginny, move into Amy's house to help care for the kids. They take them to school, soccer games, piano lessons; arrange playdates; attend class events; prepare breakfasts, lunches and dinners. "I am leading Amy's life," Ginny observes, heartbreakingly. It is in these everyday moments -- mastering the art of making toast precisely the way his youngest grandson likes it -- that Rosenblatt, who has been a Time columnist and "McNeil/Lehrer News Hour" contributor, finds the answer he hadn't sought, a lesson not about death, but about life. The key, he discovers, is "to value the passage of time." That's a lesson for us all.