"A child's suicide pitches you into a hellish place of fragmentary images, the deepest depression imaginable, efforts to destroy yourself, and an almost complete break with what's happening in the world around you. That was my experience. I wish it upon no one."

The essays of The Loneliest Places began as a chronicle of Rachel Dickinson's life after her son's suicide. The pieces became much more. Dickinson writes the unimaginable and terrifying facts of heartbreaking loss. In The Loneliest Places she tells stories from her months on the run, fleeing her grief and herself, as she escapes to Iceland and the Falkland Islands-as far as possible from the memories of her dead son, Jack. She frankly relates the paralyzing emotion that sometimes left her trapped in her home, confined to a single chair, helplessly isolated.

The tales from these years are bleak and Dickinson's journey home, back to her changed self and fractured family, is lonely. Conjuring Emily Dickinson, however, she describes how hope was sighted, allowed to perch, and then, remarkably, made actual.

Beginning
Autumn, Again
One Night
Thoughts You Have While at Your Son's Funeral
Withdrawn
Running Away
Adirondack Anniversary
Clara and Jack Sing a Duet
Seeking Permission from Donald Hall
Thoughts
Guns in the Attic
The People Who Stayed
Train Robbers and Pinkertons
Hope Is a Strange Invention
Vertigo
Thrown for a Loop
Why I Stay
The Ways in Which I Fall
Rage
Let Me Be Frank
Angry at a Dead Son
The Gentle Arts
Mourning and Melancholia, Rejected
Travel
Pursuit of Aloneness
December Snow
Merry Effing Christmas
Learning to Travel
Give Up the Ghost
Birding on Bleaker Island
Speculation
Fictional World
What Would I Take If My House Was on Fire
The Time Tim Went to Cuba
Dreamworld
Going to the Spiritualist Camp
Searching
The Dude Ranch
Visitation
Searching for Home in Italy
The Pull of Water
Change
Minefields
Soft Edges
Called Back
Lonely
Jane at the End
The Other Jack Gallagher
Staying in a Ghost Town
Anticipation
Beside the Volcano
Comeuppance
Feeling Isolated
Tim Writes Me a Letter
The Truth about Selfishness
The Present
The Corncrake

Rachel Dickinson is a travel writer, essayist, artist, and award-winning author. Follow her on X @rachelbirds.