A necessary contribution to pandemic literature that will bring comfort to many.
Stolen: Love and Loss in the Time of COVID-19 by Elizabeth Jaeger is a raw, intimate memoir chronicling her father’s harrowing battle with COVID-19 in New York City at the height of the pandemic. The story is told through diary entries and poignant flashbacks, and the narrative immerses readers in the family’s heartbreak as they are forced to watch his decline from a distance due to hospital restrictions. Alongside this painful present, Jaeger revisits moments of her father’s life: a devoted father, playful grandfather, and family anchor. The story is told in two parallel threads: the urgent, day-by-day journal of the present, and vivid flashbacks that portray her father in better times. These tender vignettes of holidays, inside jokes, backyard moments, and his quiet wisdom flesh out the man behind the medical updates. These memories give emotional depth to the tragedy unfolding, revealing the vibrant man they lost and the emotional void his death leaves behind. As Jaeger and her family face delayed funerals, bureaucratic challenges, and the surreal nature of pandemic grief, Stolen becomes a document of both personal loss and collective trauma. It’s a story of love, resilience, and a daughter’s fierce determination to ensure her father’s humanity is remembered amidst the statistics.
Author Elizabeth Jaeger has taken a big leap of faith in putting her experiences to the page and sharing them with the world, and this bold depiction of pandemic-era hospital isolation is haunting and profoundly affecting. There’s something very stream-of-consciousness about the way she writes, yet the prose is well-controlled and never veers too far from the immediate point being made. These unfiltered diary entries lend authenticity and urgency to her storytelling while always maintaining the central point of each part of the unfolding story. The juxtaposition of past and present deepens the emotional impact as we travel back and forth through the author’s life, and she certainly honors her father’s memory with love, warmth, and heartbreaking honesty at every opportunity. What really touched me went beyond the obvious tribute to a sick and suffering family member; it reached into the true psychological impact of the pandemic, capturing the surreal disorientation of pandemic grief with harrowing precision, and reflecting Jaeger’s vulnerability in documenting her own emotional unraveling. This is truly courageous and gives voice to the silenced grief of countless families in need of closure that will never come. Stolen is a necessary contribution to pandemic literature that will bring comfort to many, and a well-penned, heartfelt personal memoir that I would certainly recommend.
