Because We Must
Because We Must
A Memoir
On March 16th, 2015, Tracy Youngblom was rushing to finish last-minute preparations for a class she would teach the next day when there was an unexpected knock at her door. Grudgingly, she answered it to find a uniformed officer standing on her front porch. Youngblom realized then that her youngest son Elias should have been arriving home from a trip to Fargo where he was visiting friends at North Dakota State University. The officer told her that Elias had been in an accident and was in the hospital. Later, she learned that his car had been struck nearly head on by a drunk driver going 70 miles per hour. Denial and shock took over as she made the long drive from their home in Coon Rapids, Minnesota. When she saw Elias in the ICU—swollen beyond recognition, covered in stitches, with a myriad of tubes attached to him—the full gravity of the situation descended.
On the day of the crash, Elias had been driving back to Coon Rapids to celebrate National Ice Cream Day with friends. An avid lover of music, he’d been working as a conductor while wrapping up his degree, moving toward his dream of becoming a marching band director. After the accident, Elias begins his long journey of recovery, which is set back when doctors announce that his optic nerves are dead. Despite it all, Elias never wavers, approaching each challenge with resilience, grace, and humor.
Alongside Elias, Youngblom faces her own challenges, staying by his side in the ICU for weeks, coordinating with other family members and friends, and never flagging in her care of her severely injured son, yet all the while coping with her own emotions, fears, and trauma. She struggles to support Elias, heal her self, and let him go on with his life. In this riveting memoir, Youngblom traverses her family’s lives before and after the accident, capturing the complications of grief, recovery, and the strength it takes to move forward—because we must.
'Because We Must is a riveting and heart-rending account of resilience in the face of unthinkable loss. Tracy Youngblom has created a masterpiece of fierce honesty and remarkable restraint, leaving the reader in awe of her wisdom and artistry.'—Helen Fremont, author of The Escape Artist and After Long Silence
'What happens when a sudden tragedy irrevocably alters your child’s future and you find yourself a foreigner in your own life? With a mother’s fierceness and a poet’s sensibility, Tracy Youngblom writes about her twenty-three-year-old son’s senseless accident and the complex moments of recovery when he nearly slipped from this world. This honest and gripping memoir, full of psychological insight and compassion, will stay with readers long after the last page is turned.'—Cynthia Blakeley, author of The Innermost House
'Deeply intelligent, fiercely tender, Tracy Youngblom’s revelatory memoir explores the complexities of loving and letting go in the wake of her son’s life-changing accident. We ache and rejoice as Youngblom brings to life tense hospital vigils, celebratory milestones, and the ever-shifting but enduring bonds between mother and son in this masterful work of storytelling. This is a book you’ll want to keep on your shelf and return to again and again.'—Annie Kim, author of Eros, Unbroken
'The messy irrevocability of a car crash propels the narrative of Because We Must, but it is in the scrupulously observed spaces in-between where—like a conductor inserting a necessary pause into a piece of music—Tracy Youngblom strikes the deepest chords. With a poet’s attention to language (occasionally parsing a single word to illuminating effect), we journey with her as she probes an accident that proved 'a portal that forced us into a new life.' Marvelous.'—James Silas Rogers, author of Northern Orchards: Places Near the Dead
‘In this riveting memoir, Tracy Youngblom relates, with precision and candor, the unthinkable aftermath of her son’s car accident caused by a drunk driver. She makes palpable her son’s extraordinary courage and grace, as well as her own fierce struggle to remain steady and hopeful as she and her family navigate a whirlwind of emotions and practical challenges during Elias’ first years of recovery.’—Marcia Pelletiere, author of A Crown of Hornets
‘Because We Must is a lyrical, yet agonized guide to what it was like for author Tracy Youngblom to almost lose her young (in his twenties) son to the very definition of a senseless accident. For her, the task of taking care for Elias turned out to be twofold: one, the obvious, ensuring the medical attention he was too weak to ensure for himself, and second—here is where the true balletic movement occurs—the need to respect his boundaries and forge her own. The result is a tribute to the beauty and the power of the parent-child bond, devoid of sentimentality and full of heart.’—Madeleine Blais is a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and author of Queen of the Court: The Many Lives of Tennis Legend Alice Marble and In These Girls Hope is a Muscle
