A sear­ing por­trait of a mother’s grief and strength in the wake of unthink­able tragedy.

Once upon a time, I was mean­der­ing down the road of life with my hus­band, Jon. It was a reg­u­lar and beige life, and it worked. It was a warm beige. We felt, and were, blessed and lucky. Nor­mal.

On the morn­ing of Octo­ber 7th, 2023, Rachel Goldberg-Polin’s beloved twen­ty-three-year-old son, Hersh, was stolen from a music fes­ti­val billed as a cel­e­bra­tion of uni­ty and love — and, in that moment, her life was for­ev­er sep­a­rat­ed into The Before and The After. Over the next eleven months, she and her hus­band, Jon, would work tire­less­ly — in pub­lic and behind the scenes — to secure the hostages’ release, to breathe some human­i­ty into the sit­u­a­tion while they were expe­ri­enc­ing relent­less emo­tion­al and psy­cho­log­i­cal tor­ment. The pow­er of her raw and fer­vent pleas soon made her the face of the hostage cri­sis. And when Hersh and five oth­er cap­tives were exe­cut­ed after sur­viv­ing 328 days of vio­lence and cru­el­ty, she would also become the face of its ulti­mate cost.

In When We See You Again, Rachel pours her pain, love, and long­ing onto paper, giv­ing voice to the bro­ken among us, and remind­ing us that even when the world feels choked with dark­ness, light exists in a dif­fer­ent way. How do we find it? Her own expe­ri­ence has been extreme, but at its essence, this is a uni­ver­sal sto­ry of try­ing to live with grief. It is a sto­ry of how we remem­ber and how we per­se­vere, of how we suf­fer and how we love.

​“There are days when I break com­plete­ly,” she writes. ​“I have cried for an entire day straight. I didn’t think it was phys­i­cal­ly pos­si­ble, but the weep­ing nev­er let up. That is a very long time to cry. I kept hop­ing I would run out of tears. And then there are days when there is a whis­per of sun. Not out there in the sky. In me. In us.”