Rosen said that the book arose after a group of children asked him questions about his son's death and they were able to discuss it in a "matter-of-fact" way. [2] It begins with a picture of Rosen looking happy, with text explaining that he is sad and only pretending to be happy. The book frequently uses a disconnection between text and image to communicate the complex feelings of grief. [3] Many Different Kinds of Love: Life, Death, and the NHS by Michael Rosen is published by Ebury. He will also appear in 2020: The Story Of Us, ITV 9pm on 16 March. I'm not opposed to talking to my son about death. But I wasn't ready for it right then. And I don't think at the age of 5 it's really productive to discuss it in terms of how badly his death would ruin me emotionally. I tried to read it to my boy on the fly, paraphrasing and skipping over the fact that the reason the man was sad is that his son had died. But it was too central to the story, eventually, I just gave up and suggested we read a different book.

Sad means go somewhere, call your doctor, get a prescription or something, just go away with that nasty business. Amazingly, he lifts the book at the end, out of sadness into something else. He does it without sounding false or pretentious or sentimental. He ends with candles. Every day I try to do one thing that means I have a good time. It can be anything so long as it doesn’t make anyone else unhappy.” Here, in this short picture book, Michael Rosen writes about sad, about faking emotions and about living with grief and sadness as he walks through life. I've been there, many times. Hope you have not. This very well illustrated book says it all, the smiling and pretending to be happy, the anger of them leaving, the memories, the photograph books, wanting to speak to them or about them to others that are gone too....or just wanting to keep it all private....and scream!

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As one who writes far too many words, I appreciate the power of Rosen’s brevity, enhanced by Blake’s sensitive artistry. (I’ve long loved both, and they’ve collaborated many times.) I never had to face close bereavement in childhood: I lost my grandparents in my twenties and beyond: all reached a good age, ending with a period of decline. Nor did I have to help my own child through bereavement when small. Quentin Blake's illustrations do not draw away from the text, rather they add to it and convey the emotions perfectly. Everyone has experienced loss. Personally, a close relative passing away when I was aged 9 is my only real experience. At the time I held an understanding of the extremities of death and how my life would be changed, but the emotions were a lot harder to comprehend. Reflecting as a 21 year old, I wish I had been given this book.

My pain is uniquely my own, and has reopened wider family complexities that go beyond what would be suitable for a bereavement group. I knew about this book. I had even heard Michael Rosen talking about it on the radio and liked the idea. But I hadn't read it.

When I first read this book, I was teaching a children's literature class. In that context, I loved it because it talked about emotions without pandering to kids, without being gooey or cutesy or saccharine. Then he risks a whole poem, a beaut. And a comment on the poem which is really scary: "This last bit means that I don't want to be here. I just want to disappear." Which rhymes, so it's really still a part of the poem. What makes me most sad is when I think about my son Eddie. I loved him very, very much but he died anyway. How did that help? It put what had happened into the context of the human race. It showed that Eddie’s death wasn’t just or only something that had happened to me, to his family, to his friends. It was something that happened to the human race and was part of the human story. We live with bacteria. Bacteria live with us. This is how it’s been for millions of years. We evolve with each other. The death of Eddie was a moment when the bacterium was so successful it failed: it killed its host and then died with it. To know these things helped me, and still does. It’s the only way I can make sense of it. Any other way feels to me senseless. I don’t believe in a fate or destiny that governs us. I don’t believe that it’s the will of a being outside life on Earth. I don’t even think any kind of “will” comes into it. It’s biology. In the rest of the book Rosen explains how he copes – or doesn't cope – when he is in that "deep dark" place and feels sad. It's a deeply personal insight; but also universal. We feel sad with and for Rosen, and by extension with and for Quentin Blake, who has given the book such heartrending illustrations.

His new collection of prose poems, Many Different Kinds of Love, with drawings by Chris Riddell, is his attempt to make sense of those missing weeks last year: “It’s just gone. You can’t quite deal with it.” He felt as if he was in a “portal”: his hospital bed liminal, like the train in Harry Potter or the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland, he says, his body “an unreliable narrator”. It is about “what it feels like to be seriously ill, what it feels like to nearly die, and what does recovery mean?” He likes to say that he is “recovering” rather than “recovered”. Covid has left him with “drainpipes” (Xen tubes) in his eyes, a hearing aid in one ear, missing toenails, a strange sandiness to his skin and he suffers from dizziness, breathlessness and “everything gets a bit fuzzy every now and then”. If a child is to *touch wood* experience loss in my class I will 100% be sharing this with them. It is such an important book and should be read by people of all ages. Many of us read books more than once. We read at different times in our lives. We read books in different ways. Things can never be the same, but some things help, says Rosen. Try to do one little good thing a day (perhaps cook a meal) or do some little thing you enjoy (perhaps catch a game on tv). Remember being sad is not being bad, but try not to make others unhappy.I've always found defining sadness difficult, as have most of us. It is very distressing to put it into words. What IS sad? urn:lcp:michaelrosenssad0000rose:epub:3736adfd-9263-4c7c-8f95-7d0897bdaa28 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier michaelrosenssad0000rose Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t9777cc8v Invoice 1652 Isbn 9781406317848 Still, life goes on and we wake up every morning pretending nothing have happened and we are HAPPY! So I offer you what I did as a set of things to think about, ignore, adapt, change, or do what you want with. I hope they give you ideas for what you might want to do if you’re faced with loss or grief. Just that. In Rosen’s thinking, talking about it, writing about it – it all helps. (Expel the ping-pong ball and regain agency!) Though in some ways his mother’s approach lingers in him. Eddie is buried in Highgate Cemetery, but Rosen doesn’t visit the grave. And he finds it troubling to watch videos of his son. “He did drama in the sixth form,” Rosen says near the end of our conversation, “and he’s in a video of one of the plays he wrote. I’ve never looked at it. I don’t think I can. He was wearing a helmet. It’s in that box.”

The remainder of the book discusses the different feelings that bereavement brings, and ways of coping with them including distracting oneself and expressing feelings through writing. It also describes how Rosen found his despair lifting and how he was able to deal with his grief and think about the good times he had with his son. [2] Reception [ edit ] The first illustration shows a person who is sad but pretending to be happy. How can you tell if someone is really feeling sad? When I first read this book, I didn't have any kids. I was able to appreciate the frank honesty of the book.The 74-year-old writer is very much alive on Zoom where, after a few technical hitches, he appears on screen seemingly as energetic as ever, his conversation an engaging ragbag of rants and anecdotes, ranging from King Lear to last night’s football match, even if names escape him occasionally. In real life, as has often been remarked, Rosen resembles the BFG, or at least Quentin Blake’s giant, all long limbs, extravagant ears and messy lines. “You’d have to ask Quentin. He’s never said: ‘By the way you are the BFG’,” he says of the illustrator with whom he has collaborated since 1974. “I think he was partly inspired by Dahl himself.”