Longing for Summer: A Season of Grief

In 2006, author Randah Ribhi Hamadeh lost her eighteen-year-old daughter, Samar, in a car accident. On the tenth anniversary of her passing, Hamadeh presents Longing for Summer, her fifth collection of poetry.

These verses, written in response to grief, have helped her not only to endure her loss but also to comfort bereaved parents in dealing with their grief as well. The raw feelings expressed in Hamadeh’s poetry are those of a mother who acknowledges the death of her daughter while revealing the longing and love that death cannot change. She believes that the idea that time heals is a myth—that instead it transforms the acute grief of a parent into chronic pain, persistent, permanent, and triggered into sharper agony by events that recall memories of the departed child. In her poems, she describes the wide range of emotions that accompany a mother’s loss in the hope of offering validation and commiseration to other parents who have lost a child.

This collection of sixty poems offers a heartfelt memorial to one woman’s daughter and comfort and sympathy to others who have experienced loss.