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"Congratulations on the resurrection of your life," a colleague wrote to Emily Rapp Black when she announced the birth of her second child. The line made Emily pause. Her first child, a boy named Ronan, had died before he turned three years old from Tay-Sachs disease, an experience she wrote about in her second book, The Still Point of the Turning World. Since that time her life had changed utterly: She had left the marriage that fractured under the terrible weight of her son's illness, remarried a man who she fell in love with while her son was dying, had a flourishing career, and given birth to a healthy baby girl. But she rejected the idea that she was leaving her old life behind--that she had, in the manner of the mythical phoenix, risen from the ashes and been reborn into a new story, when she carried so much of her old story with her.
