University of Massachusetts Press, 2025.
Guilt, love, and bittersweetness: Tracy Youngblom’s Because We Must, A Memoir, winner of the 2024 Juniper Prize for Creative Nonfiction (released March 2025), recalls the journey of Youngblom’s twenty-three-year-old son, Elias, after a car crash that resulted in damage to both of his optic nerves. In her memoir, the reader follows Youngblom as she attempts to make sense of the absurd—a freak car accident that took her son’s sight.
We first encounter Elias in the hospital, overwhelmingly reminded of the amount of damage a human body can endure. He sits in a wheelchair, his jaw wired shut, speaking through a trach tube that allows air to reach his lungs. Youngblom’s stoic composure protects her own psyche and serves as the pillar for her son’s healing. She believes that if she breaks, so does he. Almost as if we are alongside Elias, resting on the Fowler bed, Youngblom describes the dream-like haze of the three months spent in the hospital: her routines during that time (where she finds safety in stability and predictability), her son’s progressive healing (as family members and loved ones weave in and out of the scene), and his movement from the ICU to long-term hospital care. Between the chapters of the hazy hospital days, Youngblom recollects stories of her son’s childhood and his dreams of becoming a marching band director. She savors the moment Elias first learns to ride a bike and his need for her to hold onto the seat. As the chapters travel across time, the structure captures Youngblom’s stream of consciousness and memories of Elias as gentle and thoughtful. Present moments weave together with recollections, and this back-and-forth movement allows the reader to understand Elias through the tender moments his mother remembers, revealing the depth of her love.
As his other senses adapt to overcome his lack of sight, Elias describes his new world to his mother, “It’s strange to feel the sun without being able to see it. I’ve never really heard the birds before, but now I do.” Her language highlights the nuances of Elias’s new reality of darkness, and captures how his memories of people’s faces fade. To illustrate her new world through the relationship with her son, Youngblom eloquently writes: “I imagine all of the light in the world in my throat, refracted and scattering—so words can be formed out of the void.” Yet, it seems harder for Youngblom to internalize and accept her son’s blindness than it is for Elias himself. People infantilize and ignore Elias, assuming his blindness renders him incapable—like the bus driver who asks Youngblom questions about Elias’s care instead of addressing Elias directly. While Youngblom has concerns about Elias’s future, he has fewer worries, as he does not define himself by his blindness.
Youngblom explores faith and spirituality and their roles in processing the significance of the accident, and questions whether it is possible—or even helpful—to rationalize the unforeseen and accidental. Instead of rationalizing, she must accept that Elias lost his sight to a collision with a drunk driver speeding the wrong way down the interstate. And when he lived: “We realized our lives had been given to us, repeatedly.”
In this memoir, the reader learns about the pleasures and pains of a mother’s love within the context of life’s tragic unpredictability. Rather than hiding in the darkness, Elias defines himself by his passions, while Youngblom hesitantly embraces and adjusts to an uncertain world.
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Simone Bello-Englesbe is an honors student at Penn State University with a major in philosophy and minors in Spanish and English. She graduates this May and plans to move to England for work. Outside her studies and extracurriculars, Simone enjoys learning new hobbies and spending time with friends and family.
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