Dear Reader,

This is not a book review. MLive does not write book reviews.

That’s OK, because “It’s Hard Being You” is much more than a book to me. First, it’s written by a longtime colleague and friend, Sharon Emery, who worked for our company as a journalist for 20 years.

Second, the raw and brave journey through grief that Emery documents in her memoir speaks not only to struggles I’ve had in my life, but to universal themes about seeking answers to unknowns, about finding sense amid loss and summoning the courage to keep going.

You don’t need a book review; you need to know Emery’s journey to the book. It starts like this: What do you do if you lose your daughter and your only two siblings in different but distinctly tragic ways in a short amount of time? How do you remain a wife, a mother to three other children, a coworker – your very self – as the immense undertow of grief is threatening to pull you under?

Emery decided to do what a lifelong journalist would: Investigate and tell the story.

“I kept thinking, ‘I need to assemble the facts and the drama would create itself,” Emery said. “I found out it didn’t quite work that way, because the facts I needed were buried in me and I needed to mine them.

“It was a brand-new experience, and not one I particularly enjoyed.”

Emery was an assistant editor for our company – then known as Booth Newspapers – helping oversee our reporters in Lansing, Detroit and Washington D.C. She was good at her job, especially so since she has had a profound stutter her whole life. While I never worked side by side with her, I worked for the papers that ran her work and we’d cross paths as colleagues.

For years I wondered if she knew my first name, because when the phone rang and it was the Lansing Bureau, the first words I’d hear were “Hey, Hiner. …” Emery had a caustic sense of humor and blunt approach.

That’s not unusual for journalists, but in time I came to understand that she also wasn’t going to let anyone define her, in her own words, as “a disfluenced speaker in a world that idolizes the glib and the fearless.”

Readers of the book will come to understand that outward demeanor was a way to navigate a world without excuses. But it also was a wall to protect herself – she wasn’t going to be a victim. That worked in the professional world but proved to be an obstacle to telling the story of her journey through grief.

“It came down to this: I didn’t want to get too deeply into my own suffering because I don’t really see myself as someone who suffers. As it turns out, that was the story.”

That suffering began 20 years ago when Emery’s younger sister, Jan, died by suicide. Emery began trying to piece together the life of Jan, who had estranged herself from family and began following mystical teachings in New Mexico, in the hopes of finding answers to what might motivate her sister to leap from a bridge over a gorge.

Months later, in August 2002, Emery’s eldest child, Jessica, drowned while at the family cottage on Lake Huron. Jessica had intellectual and emotional disorders and was prone to seizures – another form of family challenge and another point of family rallying that defines Emery’s life story.

The drowning was a shattering experience for Emery, her husband and their other three children and it catalyzed the grief that is the axis of this book and of Emery’s existence since. Nine years after Jessica’s death, Emery’s remaining sibling, brother Ralph, died of health issues brought on by alcohol abuse.

This passage from the book speaks to Emery’s belief that if grief exists, the departed exist:

“Mother and child are forever tethered. So when Jess fell into that bottomless chasm that is death, it was treacherous for me. Would I be pulled in after her? Many times I felt the menacing tug. Many times I wanted to surrender to it.

“But … the tether has created the narrative line I’ve been seeking for so long. All of the disparate, loose elements of my existence have been pulled taut. Hopefully, that tether will prove useful to someone else. ... In any case, it has allowed me to live. And it has allowed Jessica to live on.”

Emery’s book arose out of two essays – one each on the death of her sister and her daughter – and a desire to record and explain it to her remaining three children (one of whom, Ben, is the founder and front man of the popular band Lord Huron).

Ultimately, the central theme of grief and survival became personal and then, like all good literature, universal.

“Joan Didion said, ‘We tell stories in order to live.’ We put our experiences in some sort of context – ‘This happened to ME, this is where I put it in my life,’” Emery said. “Everyone’s got one of these tragedies in their life.”

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Sharon Emery will appear at a book-signing event from 1-3 p.m. April 3 at the Community Music School of Michigan State University, 4930 Hagadorn Road, East Lansing. Some of the proceeds will go to the Jessica Emery Schneider Music Services Therapy Fund.

John Hiner is the vice president of content for MLive Media Group. If you have questions you’d like him to answer, or topics to explore, share your thoughts at editor@mlive.com.