The Presence of Absence: Kitchen Table Talks about Parenting, Leaving Fundamentalism, and the Very Messy Business of Living with Loss

＂When I laid down the dogma, I picked up wonder for the world.＂ And that wonder, Desiree Richter has found, is as much about embracing pleasure as it is about granting grief the stewardship that it requires. In 2000, Richter’s two-year-old son Elijah died in a tragic domestic accident. The world as she knew it was dismantled along with her understanding of her place in it, leaving her to figure out how to parent her remaining children, how the fundamentalist Christian faith she’d practiced all her life fit into her new reality--and, most fundamentally, how to heal.

This book is a tapestry woven by someone who has faced what most refuse to even imagine and lived to tell about it, and much more. From vignettes about grief-infused dating to stress-tested advice on parenting through hypervigilance, trauma, and transformation, The Presence of Absence is an artful rendering of one mom’s defiant desire to dream a new life in the face of great loss.

Desiree Richter is a writer, musician, and educator. She writes about bereavement, post-fundamentalism, and parenting (often the intersection of these three things). It is her belief that loss is the tie that binds us all and that, especially in these times, writing about loss in honest ways can help us to heal. She is also a research instructor and dissertation consultant who has helped many doctoral students shape, conduct, and defend their research. Desi lives in New Orleans with several of her amazing offspring and way too many cats. Her dream is to travel the world and lead art-infused grief retreats where no one has to get fixed--just loved.