Recently, UNCW students had the privilege to attend a lecture at Lumina Theater given by an incredible woman: acclaimed writer Ann Hood. Author of 13 books, Hood has a way with words-a quality that makes her a captivating public speaker.

On Oct. 4 in a professor’s office before the lecture, Hood ruminated on life and the craft of writing while lounging cross-legged in a comfy chair. It would be almost impossible not to like her immediately. Her comfortable presence and quick wit put you at ease. When meeting her, it takes only a few minutes to realize that this is a woman who has truly lived and is at peace with that life.

However, Hood is no stranger to grief and loss. On April 18, 2002, her five-year-old daughter, Grace, died suddenly from a virulent form of strep throat. 

Throughout her life, reading and writing were her constant companions in times of need.

“As much as I loved to read to escape, I loved to write to understand the world in which I lived,” said Hood.

However, after her daughter’s unexpected death, Hood’s entire life seemed to stall–and even these usual comforts abandoned her.

“I realized I couldn’t read and, as time went on, I couldn’t write either,” said Hood.

After months of living in this free fall, Hood decided to try something new: knitting. In a world filled with crippling grief and debilitating panic attacks, knitting became her place of solitude. She remembers her knitting instructor explaining to her that there is nothing that cannot be fixed in knitting-you simply pull it apart and start over.

“It was the best thing anyone could have said to a brokenhearted mother,” said Hood.

For two years, Hood was incapable of putting words down on paper. Finally, she decided that it was time to try again. She started by simply writing on Post-It notes all of the words she now associated with grief, the things life had taught her in the past two years: anger, guilt, hope, love and friendship.

These little notes were the start of her bestselling novel, “The Knitting Circle.” The book was a semi-autobiographical account of her experience, with characters that personified each emotion she now associates with grief.

Eventually, Hood was able to move a step beyond that by writing a memoir, “Comfort,” which chronicles the actual experience of losing her daughter.

Janet Ellerby, an English professor at UNCW, includes “Comfort” on the reading list for her Studies in Nonfiction: The Literary Memoir class. It’s a story that she identifies with after losing her parents, her sister, and her best friend in a short span of time.

“I couldn’t shake my sense of disconnection and loneliness,” said Ellerby. “Reading Ann Hood with my students changed that. As we talked about her work, we shared our fears, our losses and our sorrows with the understanding and compassion that Ann’s words generate, and my feelings of disconnection and loneliness were replaced by comfort and connection.”

Hilary Netsch, one of Ellerby’s students this semester, also found Hood’s story of grief particularly moving.

“I found it to be both a riveting story about loss and a tool to help overcome my own recent encounter with losing someone you love,” said Netsch. “My heart went out to Ann Hood because she did share her story and how difficult it was to continue her daily life, and it made my own struggles that much more validated.”

During her lecture, Hood also shared the most touching part of her story. Three years after their daughter’s death, she and her husband adopted Annabelle, a little girl from China whose birthday just happens to be the same date as Grace’s death.

In the midst of the adoption, Hood discovered an East Asian belief regarding something called the red thread of fate.

“It’s the belief that we are connected to the people in our life by an invisible red thread,” said Hood. “It can stretch or tangle, but never break.”

On their first April 18 with their new daughter, Hood and her family celebrated Annabelle’s birthday for the first time while also mourning their other daughter’s death. As Hood watched her little girl enjoying her birthday party in the backyard, she was filled with thoughts of that red thread: the one that connected her to Grace and Annabelle to a mother who lived a world away, one Hood would never know, who had lost a child that she now had the privilege to love.

At the end of her lecture, Hood posed one final question: “Who is at the end of your red thread?”