Life after loss: remembering Miranda Frum

Danielle Crittenden discusses her new book, “Dispatches from Grief,” which details the aftermath of her daughter’s unexpected death.

Danielle Crittenden never, ever wanted to write “Dispatches from Grief,” to detail the unexpected tragedy of losing her 32 year-old daughter, Miranda Frum. Danielle and her husband, David Frum, have been friends of mine for almost two decades. I met their daughter Miranda when she was 17—at the height of her authority-testing adolescence. I realize now, that I’m so lucky to have known Miranda for almost half her life. We met in the summer of 2008, a saucy teen whom I first caught sight of crouched on the back steps of a notable literary agent’s townhouse, the night after she persuaded a bartender to serve her in NYC and was busted by her mother. We didn’t speak much, but whatever was left of my 17 year-old self was vastly intimidated by Miranda’s chutzpah and joie de vivre. As we both matured, Miranda became a friend and was even a founding member of the Firing Line team, helping me launch this program in our first seasons from 2018-2019.

Miranda resigned from Firing Line to treat a startling diagnosis: a rare nonmalignant brain tumor. After a miraculous ten hour surgery that spared her life and saved her vision, Miranda was instructed to go forth and live a full life—with the not insignificant detail that the loss of her pituitary gland, which the tumor had fully compromised, would require medications to replace the complex hormones her body could no longer produce. In February of 2024, Miranda was planning a party to celebrate five years of life post brain tumor, when she was found dead in her Brooklyn apartment.

“Here you are in your home and your life as you know it. And you get up in the morning and you have coffee, and a meteorite hits your house,” says Danielle. “And all that’s left is a smoking ruin, that everything that was familiar the day before is gone.”

“There’s these myths of the five stages of grief, and shouldn’t you be at acceptance now?” she says. “And the person who’s lost this child just learns to go quiet because they can’t express what they’re really going through and people understandably move on in their lives.”

Danielle wrote this book not as a self-help book, but in the hope of trying to understand “this world that I had suddenly entered.” Sometimes people don’t know how to help or relate to someone who is grieving. I too have felt lost as to how to support a friend who’s experienced such a devastating loss and grieving in a way I wouldn’t even wish on my worst enemy. What I loved about Danielle’s book is the way it gave me a glimpse into what she has experienced in the last two years, and a way to empathize, even though there’s no way I could ever imagine having to endure what she and her husband David have endured for the last two years.

“Sometimes people in our situation get resentful or begrudge the fact that people can’t imagine it or don’t understand the depths, and they’re not even begrudged. They just feel not understood, not seen. And to what you’re saying, I would just say, well, how could you imagine it?”

Danielle says the best way to comfort them is to lean into that pain, even if it means saying the wrong thing. “I don’t blame people for saying the wrong things because they don’t know,” she says. “What you want are people to lean into the suck…and just to take your hand.”

Danielle wrote in the Wall Street Journal about the “digital haunting” that she has faced since Miranda died—the emails and texts that remain on her iPhone, the Facebook memory photos that ambush her—and expressed the frustration of coping with her daughter’s death in the digital age.

“Our digital lives outlast our physical ones,” says Danielle. “Her phone number is still in my list of favorites. Am I going to delete that?”

“I don’t want to” move on, says Danielle.

Danielle takes great issue with what she calls “happiness hucksters,” people who insist that grief is somehow a gift. While she acknowledges that she has learned something from her suffering—empathy, patience, a sense of embodying her daughter—she rejects the grief-fluencers who insist that grief is a gift.

“It does make you, I think, a bigger and better person. But as a gift, I would happily return it.”

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