Unstuck in Time: A Memoir and Mystery on Loss and Love

By Nancy Avery Dafoe

Book Overview

A personal, meditative journey through love and grief, Unstuck in Time, A Memoir and Mystery on Loss and Love is a hybrid memoir focused on the sudden death of the author's 32-year-old son Blaise Martin Dafoe. This memoir reveals dual mysteries: why an apparently healthy, athletic young man in the prime of his life dies suddenly and how he remade himself as extraordinary giver without his family's knowledge before his death. Unstuck in Time takes readers through parallel journeys, one through the author's grief, revelations about her son's illnesses come too late, and an unfolding of national grief due to the world-wide pandemic.Stricken with the rare genetic disorder Marfan syndrome, the author's son was also found to have had stage four Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma that no one was aware of until a medical examiner's surprising discoveries at autopsy. What was known before his death was that Blaise had conquered an addiction to drugs. Blaise's strength and courage are only fully understood after his death. Unstuck in Time is also a philosophical reflection on time, love, death, and hope. Structurally experimental, the memoir is shaped through an anachronistic examination of a life, mirroring the way in which the past continually interrupts present. The author's memoir is lyrical in its prose and a vessel for poetry. Unstuck in Time offers a window into the life of a gentle boy become man whose life retains elements of mystery, as do the strangeness and wonders of life, death, grief, and love.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1950251047
• ISBN13: 9781950251049
• Release Date: September 2021
• Publisher: National League of American Pen Women Inc
• Length: 296 Pages
• Weight: 0.31 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"
• Age Range: 14 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 9 to Postsecondary