Ground Control
Losing My Child to Suicide
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Ground Control
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Summary
Suicide is a trajectory, one that confounds those left behind.
When Marlo Miazga’s fourteen-year-old child, Mars, dies by suicide after less than a year of visible mental health struggle, her world fractures overnight. While in the throes of unimaginable grief, Miazga begins a relentless investigation to understand how a bright, sensitive, deeply loved child could slip beyond reach.
Her search takes her through a fragmented healthcare system struggling to support children in crisis, into Mars’s online community where pain is shared in coded language adults rarely see, and inward to confront guilt, love, anger and the unbearable weight of unanswered questions.
Raw, intimate and unsparing, Ground Control lays bare the reality of losing a child to suicide while refusing silence or stigma. Miazga writes with fierce honesty about parenting a curious and complex child, about what was visible and what was hidden, and about the questions that remain when a life ends too soon.
More than a memoir about grief, Ground Control is an act of love, a demand for better systems, and a lifeline for anyone trying to understand how tragedy happens and how to continue afterward.
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Critic reviews
“In Ground Control, Marlo Miazga embarks on the most difficult investigation—to find the what and the why of her child's suicide. If there can be goodness and grace in the wake of a death, this memoir is a place to hold them. Miazga finds answers, some raw, many wrenching, and others honest, to a central question of being human: How do we find something to live for?” —Claire Cameron, author of How to Survive a Bear Attack
“Do not avoid this book because of its subject matter. Read it. Witness it. Devastating, brutal and beautiful, Ground Control is Marlo Miazga’s attempt to make sense of the senseless after the death of her child, Mars. It is a story of grief, guilt, love and how to hang on, and a call for change in a mental health system that failed them. Its honesty challenges the stigma and shame surrounding suicide.” —Jowita Bydlowska, author of Unshaming
“Marlo Miazga's Ground Control is a deeply felt, unflinching account of one of the worst things a family can survive: a teenager's suicide, and the awful reckoning that follows. Ground Control is at once a profound meditation on bottomless parental grief and a fast-paced, forensic dig through a shaky medical system's long, byzantine corridors. Set against the backdrop of the COVID emergency, Miazga goes looking for who failed her child. The hospitals and overworked caregivers? The therapists who couldn't quite reach them? The online world that, by turns, helped and isolated them? The answers are heartbreaking, especially once she turns her same pitiless lens on herself. What happened to Mars is every parent's nightmare. But this is also the rare book willing to shine a light into the darkest, least-discussed corner of adolescent mental health. In other words, this necessary book might save a life.” —Lisa Gabriele, author of The Winters
“Do not avoid this book because of its subject matter. Read it. Witness it. Devastating, brutal and beautiful, Ground Control is Marlo Miazga’s attempt to make sense of the senseless after the death of her child, Mars. It is a story of grief, guilt, love and how to hang on, and a call for change in a mental health system that failed them. Its honesty challenges the stigma and shame surrounding suicide.” —Jowita Bydlowska, author of Unshaming
“Marlo Miazga's Ground Control is a deeply felt, unflinching account of one of the worst things a family can survive: a teenager's suicide, and the awful reckoning that follows. Ground Control is at once a profound meditation on bottomless parental grief and a fast-paced, forensic dig through a shaky medical system's long, byzantine corridors. Set against the backdrop of the COVID emergency, Miazga goes looking for who failed her child. The hospitals and overworked caregivers? The therapists who couldn't quite reach them? The online world that, by turns, helped and isolated them? The answers are heartbreaking, especially once she turns her same pitiless lens on herself. What happened to Mars is every parent's nightmare. But this is also the rare book willing to shine a light into the darkest, least-discussed corner of adolescent mental health. In other words, this necessary book might save a life.” —Lisa Gabriele, author of The Winters
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