When Death Takes Something from You Give it Back

Danish novelist and poet Naja Marie Aidt’s 2019 memoir, When Death Takes Something from You Give it Back: Carl's Book, concerns the death of her twenty-five-year-old son, Carl, who in 2015, died in a freak accident induced by psychosis after taking psilocybin mushrooms. Aidt focuses on the intense grief she endured in the wake of Carl’s sudden death. The memoir is notable for its use of many different literary forms—from critical essay, to free verse poem, to manifesto—to grapple with the irresolvable fact of the loss of Carl. It also alludes to a variety of modern and classical works, from the ancient Mesopotamian work The Epic of Gilgamesh to twentieth-century essayist Joan Didion’s Blue Nights. As a result, the memoir is also a meditation on the inability of language to fully capture the full range and depth of human experience.

The memoir’s first sentence summarizes its central, difficult event: “It is 16 March 2015, and Carl is dead.” She writes that she had last written to him that January, two months and three days before he died by throwing himself from the high balcony of an apartment building. In a way typical of other grief memoirs, she chronicles the process of trying in vain to bring her son back to life through the power of writing about his death. She pores over the writings he left behind, stitching together fragments of his poetry and journals to reconstruct his voice. She combines this mosaic of evidence of Carl’s life with her memories of being his mother. These memories include his birth by C-section, his early childhood art projects, and their first excursions together. She notes that she is “afraid to forget” about Carl, with so few physical objects left with which to attach his memory. Most of his childhood possessions, including primary school art, were burned in a warehouse fire.

The cause of Carl’s death is not revealed until the latter half of the book. It begins with a phone call Aidt and her husband receive unusually late in the evening when they are eating dinner. Ironically, just before the phone rings, the family toasts their oldest son and his partner. They then begin talking about Carl, expressing disappointment that he didn’t get into film school. The first time the phone rings, they ignore it. Then, all of their cell phones start ringing. Aidt’s mother, present at the dinner, finally answers a call from Aidt’s sister. Through the receiver, Aidt can hear her sister screaming, and knows something is terribly wrong.



Over the remainder of the memoir, Aidt returns several times to an italicized account of Carl’s life and the event of his death. Each time she loops back in time, she reveals another fragment of the narrative. The book concludes with a vivid account of Aidt’s own struggle to survive in the aftermath of the tragedy. She reflects that it is strange that he still exists in her muscle memory and that she constantly has to remind herself that he is gone. She is overwhelmed with compulsive thoughts about her deceased son. In one of her final poetic lines, she states, “Loss is communal/And death/Unwanted/Random.” The memoir’s last section is an epitaph written for Carl: “Carl Emil Aidt was a gifted, loving, spiritual man who exhibited artistic talents from the age of five. He liked to draw and play the guitar and read poetry, especially Walt Whitman. He was a film buff, a vegetarian, and a cook who enjoyed nature and long hikes. He was interested in Greek myths/fables and took his first shamanistic journey a week before his death. He was born on November 21, 1989, and died on March 16, 2015.” Aidt’s act of writing her son’s epitaph frames the narrative about her grief and suggests that writing has helped her give the tragedy closure.