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Christine Redmond’s Picking Up the Pieces: A Nurse’s Grief Memoir from the Front Line
09/07/25, 11:00
When her father dies during the height of the pandemic, Christine Redmond — an intensive care nurse — must confront not only grief, but the emotional cost of caregiving, memory and unresolved family pain.
- Picking Up the Pieces is a searing memoir by Christine Redmond, an intensive care nurse who was on the front line of the COVID-19 pandemic — while privately navigating the grief of losing her father. His death, complicated by years of estrangement and emotional distance, forces her to re-examine childhood memories, family silence, and the unspoken rules of how we mourn.
Intertwining scenes from the ICU with raw reflections on love, loss and identity, Christine’s story is not just about death — it’s about reckoning. Reckoning with the truth about her father, with the protective myths families create, and with the unprocessed trauma that nurses and carers often carry beneath their professional exterior.
Written with intelligence, empathy and brutal honesty, this memoir captures the emotional toll of caregiving during crisis, the layered nature of family grief, and the subtle process of healing not just from loss — but from what was never said.
Picking Up the Pieces is for readers drawn to real-life memoirs of emotional survival, compassion, and the long shadow of childhood relationships. It’s a story of facing pain — not to erase it, but to understand it.
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