Be ready to cry. I read Hannah’s Gift probably twenty years ago, most likely after buying it in an airport, and then sobbed my way through the flight. Housden recounts the final year of her three-year-old daughter Hannah’s life as she faced cancer, making this a raw and tender story about a little girl’s life, her death, and the way her parents learned to live with grief.
The part that has stayed with me all these years is Hannah’s mother’s insistence that we make the best decisions we can with the information we have at the time, and then resist the urge to go back and endlessly rehash them. There is a kind of grace in accepting that we acted with what we knew, in the moment we had, instead of punishing ourselves later with hindsight.
That idea has stayed with me far beyond the book. I may need to find the courage to read this one again.