Fran Dorf

Fran Dorf, MA, MSW, is a poet, essayist, and author of three acclaimed novels, including Saving Elijah (Putnam), which was inspired by the 1994 death of Fran's son, Michael. Fran blogs on life, grief, culture, arts, etc. at www.bruisedmuse.com and is currently working on a memoir of survival stories. Fran is also a psychotherapist and conducts “write to heal” workshops to help people cope with grief, loss, illness, and trauma. In 1999, Fran and her husband, Bob, started Jumpstart, an educational program for toddlers with special needs in their small city. Fran appeared on the radio show “Healing the Grieving Heart” with Dr. Gloria & Dr. Heidi Horsley to discuss “Writing to Heal.” To hear Fran being interviewed on this show, click on the following link: www.voiceamericapd.com/health/010157/horsley082808.mp3

Articles:

Twenty Years After Child-Loss, a Mother Remembers

On October 22, 1990, I became the mother of two children. I will always be the mother of two children. Our daughter, Rachel, was already nine, but we’d been unable to conceive a second child after my husband’s shocking bout of cancer two years into our marriage, and so after several miscarriages and years on the artificial insemination rollercoaster, we’d arranged to adopt. It was a boy. He was a month early. We were thrilled. Bob and I flew to the birth mother’s southern city, made our way to the hospital, and stood at the nursery window. The 4-pound incubated […]

Reflections on Young-Adult Grief

I was honored recently to be part of a panel discussion, “Shining a Light on Grief,” with Carole Geithner, author of “If Only,” a young adult novel I thought was enchanting. I’d recommend Carole’s book to anyone, young or old. I’d especially recommend it to bereaved young people, and those who want to learn more in order to help a bereaved friend. Some may find a novel like this more helpful than even a “how-to” book because it organically teaches what, and what not to do and say. “Showing” (as in a novel) is always more effective than “telling” (as […]

Turn Grief into Joy? Cliches Don’t Work for the Bereaved

As a bereaved mother who mourned and still mourns the loss of her three-year-old son, Michael, I cringed when I heard former governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, make reference to the families of the victims of the terrible shooting in Tucson. She said, off-handedly, “May God turn their mourning into joy.” In my view, such sentiments, which seem so commonly held in this country, show a complete misunderstanding for both mourning AND joy, and maybe even for God too. Let’s leave politics aside for the moment, along with my personal feelings about Sarah Palin. I’m sure Ms. Palin meant those words […]

Butterflies or Bull? Channeling Messages from the Dead

A few days ago, I went to see a performance by “channeler” Roland Comtois, when he appeared locally before a group of about forty parents who’ve lost children. I like to “suss” things out, as my son’s former nanny, a lovely woman from Derry, Northern Ireland, used to say. I’ll admit up front that I’m very interested in this sort of thing, but highly skeptical. My novels, including the two I wrote before I lost Michael, employ supernatural elements. My heightened ambivalence in this case stemmed from factors over and above my usual skepticism about all things supernatural, spiritual and/or […]

The ‘Inoculation Effect’ of Major Grief

My trusty Shorter Oxford English Dictionary includes this definition of the word “inoculate”: The deliberate introduction into the body of a micro-organism, especially in order to induce immunity to a disease; vaccination. In the fifteen years since my three-year-old son, Michael, died, I’ve found the idea of an “inoculation effect” a useful and even consoling way to think about my loss. I admit the analogy is imperfect, since no one would ever “deliberately” introduce an innocent to agonizing grief, or as I call it in my novel, Saving Elijah, “big time grief,” but I stand by it. So what does […]

Growing Through Grief

Around 1:30 in the afternoon, Dec. 7, 1993 – by coincidence, Pearl Harbor Day – I put my three-year-old son, Michael, down for his nap, went to my office, turned on the intercom, and began to work on my third novel. The intercom was silent, and I wrote steadily. Around 4 p.m., mildly concerned that Mikey was sleeping too long, I went to wake him up. I found him in the midst of a silent, deadly seizure. I started to scream, my husband came running, and although we didn’t really know it then, we had arrived with our baggage at […]

What Happened Between Two Children was Extraordinary

By Fran Dorf The following is the Prologue for Saving Elijah, Fran Dorf’s novel about child-loss. When the woman phoned, I couldn’t place her name until she said she was Maggie’s mother. Then I knew. They’d made quite a pair at the hospital, my son and her daughter. Eight-year-old Maggie was stricken and hairless and exhausted, her ashen face steroid-bloated beyond all reason. Five-year-old Elijah, with his thick glasses and crossed eyes, looked like a weird little Martian, his red-blond curls pasted to his skull with goop, an electrode and wire bonnet attaching him to a rolling EEG machine. He […]

Film Review: The Sweet Hereafter

By Fran Dorf — This somber, difficult film directed by Atom Egoyan, based on the 1991 novel by Russell Banks, is set in a small town in the aftermath of a school bus accident that has killed most of the town’s children. Into this devastating scene descends a slick, big city, ambulance-chasing lawyer, played by Ian Holmes. He is a man pursued by the demons of losing his own daughter to drugs, and he visits each of the victims’ parents to stir up their anger and coax them to participate in a class action lawsuit to profit fr om the […]

Film Review: The Door in the Floor

Review by Fran Dorf — This 2004 film honestly examines a marriage breaking apart after child-loss. Adapted from the first (and best, in my opinion) part of John Irving’s best-selling novel, A Widow for One Year, the film is set in the affluent beach community of East Hampton, N.Y., and takes place during one critical summer in the lives of famous children’s book author and artist Ted Cole (Jeff Bridges) and his beautiful wife Marion (Kim Basinger). The Cole’s once-sweet marriage has curdled in the aftermath of the tragedy of losing their twin teenage sons in a car accident, and […]

Film Review: The Savages

Reviewed by Fran Dorf — Written and directed by Tamara Jenkins, The Savages is a nuanced, closely observed film about a middle-aged brother and sister reckoning with their guilt, responsibility, and ambivalent feelings when their long estranged father develops vascular dementia and has to be placed in a nursing home. Funny and tragic, with amazing performances by the gifted Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney as siblings Jon and Wendy, with incredible work by Philip Bosco as their father, Lenny, The Savages lacks a single false moment. It believably conveys complex characters and their tragic situation without trying to imposing […]

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