Book Reading of Stacey Meadows’s ‘Pine Melody’ a Success in Lambertville
I was so happy to help author Stacey Meadows publish Pine Melody: A Memoir, a masterfully written account of her son Jonah’s death in a car accident and her coming to terms with it that culminated in this extraordinary book.
The photos are from Stacey’s book reading, held in Lambertville, New Jersey.
Visit the website for Pine Melody
Swerving to avoid a deer on a dark Wisconsin highway in early summer, 22-year old Gabe lost control of the car. His 29 year- old brother, Jonah, singing along with him as he drove, absorbed the full force of the impact with an oncoming pick-up truck driven by the Chief of a First Nation. The crash left Jonah with severe traumatic brain injury, Gabe with a broken femur, and soil samples, meticulously gathered for Jonah’s graduate research project on agroforestry, strewn across the highway.
As general counsel for a Philadelphia medical center, I was competent enough to interact with my sons’ care teams, but lost all semblance of professionalism when neither my legal expertise, search for a medical miracle, nor tenacity of my love was able to bring benefit to Jonah, who lingered in a coma for three months, before dying in hospice. I was left to find a way to carry on for the sake of Jonah’s brothers while handling my own grief and helplessness.
Immersing myself in Jonah’s journals, and memories of his extraordinary, spirit-filled life, my pillars materialized—meditation, yoga, prayer and sailing. With Jonah as my spirit guide, in the bardo and beyond, I navigated pathways between terror and beauty that Jonah had spent his life seeking. Pine Melody is the result of my journey.