Your "to be read" list just got way longer
Kerri Miller's Must-Read
"Kadian Journal"by Thomas Harding
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I cried on the plane. I'd left two chapters of Thomas Harding's luminous memoir for the flight home and I thought my stiff upper lip would hold.
It didn't.
In the summer of 2012, fourteen-year-old Kadian Harding was killed in a bicycle accident. His father, riding just a short distance behind him, was a witness to it.
Moments earlier, they'd paused at the crest of a hill and breathed in the loveliness of the English countryside. "It is so beautiful here," Harding remembers his son saying with a "dreamy smile."
Harding began a journal that tragic night — discovering, he tells us, that it helps him "focus on, not Kadian's death but Kadian as he was, alive."
We meet Kadian as he tastes chocolate ice cream for the first time, obsesses over video games, roams with his dog Duke and gets a triple-decker first kiss. He is bright and warm and real and vital in his dad's reflections.
And that's what caught me unawares as I accepted a tissue from the flight attendant and finished the memoir: Not the tragic details of Kadian's death but the knowledge that this boy would have lived the life ahead of him with such vitality and zest.
Radio listeners, I'll be interviewing Thomas Harding in January.
-K.M.
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