The moon and the Sunflower

The woman who loses her husband is a widow; the one who loses her parents is an orphan. But a woman who loses her child experiences something beyond words. This experience—the greatest pain in the world—cannot be named. To endure the unnameable is to revert to the helpless state of a newborn, unable to process any sensation that doesn't come from her own depths. The outside world falls silent; the inner world screams with every touch. How does a woman feel in the face of a child's death? This question is, in a way, the starting point for the book The Moon and the Sunflower: one day, mothers in mourning; another day, mothers in light, written by Marina Miranda Fiuza based on the testimonies of seven mothers whose children, of various ages, passed away under different circumstances. Published by Primavera Editorial, the work includes a foreword by the Portuguese writer Valter Hugo Mãe.

"Parents of the dead are deeply unsettled. We don't always know where their head or feet are, because so much of what grounds them is now of another nature. We stand before them, astonished, for they possess a knowledge that no library can hold, simply because there's no way to explain the absurd; it is an inexpressible experience that books will always fail to imitate."

– Valter Hugo Mãe