The Angel In My Pocket: A Story of Love, Loss, and Life After Death, (Viking; On sale July 7, 2014; 9780670026319; $27.95) by Sukey Forbes, is the profoundly moving story of a mother’s unconventional path to healing after the death of her young daughter. Told with unflinching honesty and hard-won wisdom, Forbes’s memoir is a powerful story of rediscovering life by discovering the afterlife, coping with the pain of loss, and recapturing the joy of living.
When Forbes lost her six-year-old daughter Charlotte to a rare genetic disorder, life as she knew it was shattered. Even as she was devastated by her loss, Forbes knew her own life was not over, and she searched for a way to both come to terms with her daughter’s death, and find a way back to a full, meaningful life. The door to both these paths opened when Forbes found a prominent medium who helped her connect with Charlotte on the other side. With the medium’s help, Forbes found reassurance that Charlotte was not truly gone, but rather existed on a different part of the continuum of life and death. These experiences gave Forbes the comfort and peace she needed to march once more into life, aware of all it might hold in store for her. She was determined that she and her family not just survive their loss, but thrive.
The Angel In My Pocket details Forbes’s entire journey from despair to a state of resilience and grace. Forbes’s family traditions played a strong, if contradictory, role in how she processed her daughter’s death. As the descendant of two of New England’s oldest and most distinguished families (that includes Ralph Waldo Emerson, Forbes’s great-great-great grandfather), Forbes was raised in a rarified world of threadbare privilege that valued emotional reserve and strict self-reliance. There is also, however, a widespread belief in ghosts—especially those that haunt Naushon Island, a 6,000 acre family property off of Cape Cod that has remained largely unchanged since its purchase by her family in 1843. The Island is filled with history, artifacts, and the visible presence of departed ancestors.
In the immediate aftermath of Charlotte’s death, the austerity of her WASP-y upbringing prevented Forbes from fully expressing her grief. She returned to Naushon for the solace of the island’s other-worldly beauty and in digging through the family archives, discovered a surprising number of her ancestors who believed in reincarnation and studied mysticism. She found further kinship with the philosophies of Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose son—similar to Charlotte—died at the age of six. Buoyed by the revelation that her family was as spiritually eccentric as it was stoic and reserved, Forbes became determined to break through her conditioned responses and embrace the complexities and legacy of her heritage.
The Angel In My Pocket is an empowering and enlightening look at one woman’s complicated and uncommon route through grief. Forbes is heir to a lost American spiritual tradition that allowed her to look optimistically at life in the face of death. Like The Still Point of the Turning World and Proof of Heaven, Forbes’s story offers hope and help to anyone who is grieving the loss of a loved one.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sukey Forbes currently lives near Boston, where she runs an art, antiques, and interior design company. Read more about Sukey here.