#Once more we saw stars series

Over the course of a couple of days, a man named Jim leads them through a tobacco tying ceremony and leads them on a spirit journey, during which Jayson recounts vivid hallucinations of Greta and senses her presence imbued in the earth.Īfter recounting the sprit vision, Greene jumps ahead to the moments before their son’s birth, in the last days of his long gestation. About 10 months after Greta’s death, Jayson and Stacy fly to New Mexico to visit the Golden Willow Retreat, a center for people in deep grief. They attend a local grief group once, but find the experience unsatisfactory.

The couple resolves to work more deliberately through their emotions surrounding Greta’s loss after the news of Stacy's pregnancy. Just before they do, they also learn that Stacy is pregnant. Eventually the couple finds a suitable two-bedroom in Brooklyn. The decision to move sets off a long period of nomadic restlessness, sleeping on friends couches and in short term rental units, during which time they have only limited, fraught contact with their families. Shortly after returning from Kripalu, Jayson and Stacy decide they need to leave the old apartment where they had raised Greta. The weekend affirms their sense that Greta’s spirit still exists in some meaningful sense.

In an effort to move beyond their profound grief, Jayson and Stacy spend a weekend at the Kripalu Institute, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where they perform healing exercises with David Kessler, a grief expert, and encounter a medium, Maureen Hancock, who they sincerely believe can commune with the dead. One day while running in the park, Greene feels Greta’s presence, and resolves to live a more spiritual life, in an effort to be receptive to what he perceives as his daughter’s lingering spirit. They return to work while struggling with grief, loneliness and anger. Eventually, their friends and family return to their normal lives, and Stacy and Jayson attempt to do the same. They hold a memorial for Greta at a Quaker school friends and family share memories of Greta, and Greene finds himself buoyed by the expressions of love and by the vaguely religious tradition, despite growing up without a strong sense of faith. Their family coalesces around them and offers a strong network of support Greene writes that he no longer has a grasp on time or space, that the violent and sudden loss of his daughter has shocked and saddened him to his core. Eventually, Greta is removed from life support and the couple finds themselves navigating a foreign, unfamiliar world without their daughter.

#Once more we saw stars series

This burdensome bureaucratic process takes over 24 hours to complete, during which time they wait, gauging the depths of their grief in a series of hospital waiting rooms. Jayson and Stacy, utterly shocked and saddened, elect to donate Greta’s organs before she is removed from life support. Soon the prognosis is clear: while Greta is functionally alive, she is brain dead, and her prognosis is fatal. While they wait, friends and family arrive and offer comfort and support. Jayson and Stacy arrive at the emergency room to find a large team of physicians tending to their daughter. While being rushed to the emergency room, Susan calls her daughter, Stacy, and her husband, Jayson Greene, Greta’s father and the first person narrator of Once More We Saw Stars. One afternoon on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, two-year-old Greta Greene sits on a bench with her grandmother, Susan, when a brick crumbles from a windowsill eight stories above, falling to earth and striking Greta on the head. The following version of this book was used to create this guide: Greene, Jayson.