A daughter measures her life in the time before and after her mother's death.
When Jessica Shannon's mother died in December 1998, Jessica was seventeen years old. She had eleven days between diagnosis and death to prepare for a life she could not yet imagine.
She is still preparing.
Twenty-seven years later, Shannon traces the long arithmetic of loss—the calculations a daughter makes when she measures her life not in milestones but in absences. The mother who was frozen at forty-four while her daughter kept aging. The graduations, horse shows, and ordinary Tuesdays that accumulated in her absence. The question that shadowed every year: what does it mean to finally live longer than the person you lost?
The Sum of Grief is a memoir about what grief actually looks like across a life—not a season of mourning with a defined end, but a constant, evolving presence. Raw, honest, and deeply human, it is the book Jessica Shannon needed and could not find anywhere else.
