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The Red Ribbon: A Memoir of Lightning and Rebuilding After Loss
The Red Ribbon: A Memoir of Lightning and Rebuilding After Loss
The Red Ribbon: A Memoir of Lightning and Rebuilding After Loss
Ebook217 pages3 hours

The Red Ribbon: A Memoir of Lightning and Rebuilding After Loss

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In the summer of 1994, a freak lightning and thunder storm explodes on the southern coast of Maine, killing Nancy Bills’s husband and critically wounding her younger son. She promises her late husband that she will write their family’s story and bind it with a red ribbon of love and courage.

In language alternately tender and gritty, The Red Ribbon documents the aftermath of Bills’s husband’s death. As a wife, she grieves and attempts to rebuild her life; as a mother, she strains to be the parent her young adult sons need. Then, one year later, she is faced with more loss—this time, the father whom she adores. After his death, other deaths, some anticipated and others unpredictable, follow. Meanwhile, the impending death of her aging mother is a particular challenge; Nancy struggles to be a good daughter, and on many visits to Montana, her home state, she tries to mend their painful history.

Insightful, moving, and full of intelligence and humanity, The Red Ribbon is a story of surviving the many and often devastating lightning strikes of life, and a gift of compassion and wisdom for readers who are struggling with their own losses.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateMay 28, 2019
ISBN9781631525742
The Red Ribbon: A Memoir of Lightning and Rebuilding After Loss
Author

Nancy Freund Bills

Nancy Bills is currently on the faculty of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Southern Maine, OLLI/USM, where she facilitates the fiction writing workshop. She is also a retired clinical social worker; during her twenty-year-long career, she served both as a psychiatric social worker at Concord Regional Hospital in New Hampshire and Maine Medical Center in Portland, Maine, and as a psychotherapist at Green House Group, a group private practice in Manchester, New Hampshire. “The Myth,” Chapter 19 of The Red Ribbon, received first place in the memoir/personal essay category of the 83rd Annual Writer’s Digest Writing Competition. Her memoir, fiction, and poetry have been published in Reflections, The Maine Review, The LLI Review, The Goose River Anthology, and in The 83rd Annual Writer’s Digest Writing Competition Collection. A member of the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance (MWPA), she lives in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, with her two Maine Coon cats.

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A beautiful quote from Alfred, Lord Tennyson starts this novel-memoir: “Tho’ much is taken, much abides…” It’s a quote that frames the story beautifully, as author Nancy Freund Bills goes through memories of lives taken away from her, and reveals so much that beautifully abides. Unlike most memoirs, this story’s not a sequential retelling of events, but rather a drawing out of character shaped by events. It’s a story that starts with the terror of sudden storms in Billings, Montana, then follows through life’s horrific storms, literal and metaphorical: first of which—most haunting of which—is the storm that kills Nancy’s husband and critically wounds her younger son.The writing is clear, evocative, and down to earth. The characters are all too real, and the terrors all too true. And the fact is, freak accidents happen, just as tragic illnesses do; but how do real people deal with the loss of those we love? And how do our flawed relationships affect our recovery?Author Nancy Freund Bills tells her story in well-formed essays, slipping through time between chapters in a very natural way, so the reader never feels lost in the transitions. Real lives slip through the author’s hands. And real storms terrorize the skies. A natural fear of thunder translates into background music to this beautiful book, and the red ribbon is a wonderful counterpoint to the lightning strikes of chance.Customs, culture, regrets and promises; hopes dashed and dreams going forward; grief in all its all-encompassing shapes and sizes, all are here in a novel-memoir that is filled with compassion, strength and hope. It’s a beautiful story, terrifying, yet beautifully told, and it’s a book that I shall treasure. A powerful depiction of grief, compassion and hope.Disclosure: I was given an ecopy and I really enjoyed it. Just wish I’d found time to read it sooner! A wonderful book.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Using a lightening strike which killed her ex-husband and severely injured her son as a metaphor for facing the sudden, devastating losses in our lives, Nancy Bills has woven a poignant tale of loss and healing which hits a universal chord.Her tender, raw and searingly honest voice draws the reader into her experience as she works her way through her grief and heartache. She then takes the lessons learned from this loss to find her way through other losses that arise in her life. It is in this years-long struggle that she finds meaning and peace in her own life. Those of us suffering losses will identify with her .The transformation she eventually experiences gives us all hope that healing after loss is possible.This memoir shows us in graphic detail the depth of pain involved in the grieving process and the courage it takes to get on the other side of it. I highly recommend it as a good read and a compassionate guide for dealing with grief.

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The Red Ribbon - Nancy Freund Bills

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