It's every mother's worst nightmare: giving birth and realizing, after the fact, that something is terribly wrong with your child. In Holding Silvan, Monica Wesolowska has written a deeply moving, affecting memoir about giving birth to a seemingly healthy, full-term baby boy who, she later learns, may have suffered oxygen deprivation during the birthing process.
Silvan's first few days dangle on a precipice of hope and despair as he fights for his life, hooked up to machines in a neonatal intensive care unit. When doctors confirm the irreversible damage to Silvan's central nervous system, Monica and her husband are forced to make a heart-wrenching decision. What is the right course of action in this case? Monica reflects upon her life, the people she has loved and lost and the meaning their lives have given to hers. She grapples with her childhood upbringing and the tenets of her lapsed Roman Catholic faith. Is it a parent's responsibility to keep a child alive at all costs--or is it more conscionable to let nature take its course?
The facts of this story are dark and grim, but the tenderness of the emotional subtext as Monica searches her soul and deals with the opinions and actions of medical professionals, family and friends, propels her courageous narrative. This sensitively drawn portrait of motherhood and marriage explores the meaning of life, survival and letting go in powerful, emotive prose that transcends grief. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines