George Bowering and Jean Baird turned their personal tragedy into a literary monument with The Heart Does Break.

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BOOKS: Living life after death

There’s nothing worse than losing a child.” It’s an accepted truth that has also become a toothless bromide in an era rife with pop psychology on TV and self-help tomes on bookstore shelves. These confessional or instructional resources give solace to some, but for Jean Baird, they offered only cold comfort.

On the morning of October 3, 2006, Baird awoke to a telephone call informing her that her 23-year-old daughter, Bronwyn, had died in a car accident in Southern Ontario. Over the next few months, as she struggled forward, the former English professor and literary researcher turned to books. As she pawed through the self-help guides recommended by well-meaning loved ones and members of her support group, she became increasingly unhappy.

“We talk about grief and mourning as if it’s a disease,” Baird says, sitting in a Kitsilano coffee shop with her husband, former Parliamentary Poet Laureate George Bowering, by her side. “Like it’s something that you’re going to get over or heal from. ‘Closure’ — that’s the one that really drives me nuts. When you have a child die, there is no closure. It doesn’t mean you’re dysfunctional.”

Baird eventually turned to literary writers, people who, as Baird says, understand language and nuance — and, yes, grammar. She found stories by U.S. and U.K. writers that dealt with grief and mourning, but almost nothing in Canadian literature. To use the jargon of the self-help industry, Baird actualized her loss and, with Bowering, compiled the 20 essays that compose The Heart Does Break: Canadian Writers on Grief and Mourning.

The stories, which range in tone from humourous to heartbreaking, are from an auspicious laundry list of Canadian writers from different backgrounds and different parts of the country. Bowering’s raw and uplifting contribution, “May I Bring You Some Tea?” — about his stepdaughter’s death and Baird’s coming to terms with it — serves as the book’s introduction; it closes with “Good Grief,” in which William Whitehead, the longtime partner of iconic author Timothy Findley, weaves together a poignant and irreverent remembrance of his beloved “Tiff.” In between are works by University of Regina professor and young-adult novelist Joan Givner (“On Preparing My Daughter’s Fiction for Posthumous Publication”), Victoria-based author and parolee Stephen Reid (“The Art of Dying in Prison”), and Cape Breton’s Linda McNutt (“Furious Hunger”).

Although both Baird and Bowering are well-known on the Canadian literary landscape, they experienced a certain amount of trepidation when it came to approaching writers. “It was difficult to research, because you can’t very well phone up your literary friends and say, ‘We’re doing this book on grief and mourning. Did someone you love desperately die in the last little while, and would you write about it?’”

“Some people who would have been perfect fits couldn’t or wouldn’t do it,” says Bowering, leading Baird to tell the story of Newfoundland writer Benice Morgan, whose husband lay dying of cancer when the Twin Towers fell on 9/11. “And she just couldn’t care less about the World Trade Center,” says Baird. “All she wanted was for George to get well... and that didn’t happen. She tried to write about it, but found she just couldn’t.

“But most of [those we approached] said, ‘You know, you’re right. I’ve never written about this, and I know why I should and I know why the book should be there, so I’ll do it.”

Asked the obvious question of whether The Heart Does Break was a healing exercise for her, Baird pauses, then says, “I’m not sure I’d use the word healing, but it was helpful, both for me and, I think, for some of the contributors. In one of the pieces in the book, Renee Rodin says, ‘Get used to living with the hole.’ That’s what I’m doing.”