Michael Rosen's Sad Book by Michael Rosen

His death inspired Rosen's 2004 tale about grief, Sad Book. Michael had Eddie with his first wife Elizabeth Steele.

'We have to say, culturally speaking, if we ship people off to hospital and say goodbye to them and don't see them again, it is very a 'cordon sanitaire' around death.' 'If it's totally medicalised then people just disappear, which isn't much different than seeing them go on holiday to France. Michael, who has rarely spoken publicly about losing his son, added: 'If you're in the presence of a dead body it does transform the way you think about death.we become slowly aware of it. 'There is a whole generation of his friends, and they were young, that came to the house and it might have been the only dead person they had ever seen.' We did that old thing of laying someone out in the house and people came from all around to see him. 'After he was in the morgue, we brought him back to the house. 'Then we did something quite strange – partly it was his mum suggested it,' Michael had told the Cheltenham Literary Festival. Michael found his second son 'cold' in bed after he had been experiencing flu-like symptoms. The former children's laureate said people 'came from all around' to see Eddie and believes it was his young friends' first experience of death. In 2021, the children's author revealed he brought his dead son back home from the mortuary so his friends could say goodbye. Michael also wrote We're Going on a Bear Hunt His latest book - Getting Better: Life lessons on going under, getting over it, and getting through it - shares the lessons Michael learned during trying times in his life.

Michael Rosen's Sad Book by Michael Rosen