On March 16th, 2015, Tracy Youngblom was rushing to finish last-minute preparations for a class she would teach the next day when there was an unexpected knock at her door. Grudgingly, she answered it to find a uniformed officer standing on her front porch. Youngblom realized then that her youngest son Elias should have been arriving home from a trip to Fargo where he was visiting friends at North Dakota State University. The officer told her that Elias had been in an accident and was in the hospital.  Later, she learned that his car had been struck nearly head on by a drunk driver going 70 miles per hour. Denial and shock took over as she made the long drive from their home in Coon Rapids, Minnesota. When she saw Elias in the ICU—swollen beyond recognition, covered in stitches, with a myriad of tubes attached to him— the full gravity of the situation descended.

On the day of the crash, Elias had been driving back to Coon Rapids to celebrate National Ice Cream Day with friends. An avid lover of music, he’d been working as a conductor while wrapping up his degree, moving toward his dream of becoming a marching band director. After the accident, Elias begins his long journey of recovery, which is set back when doctors announce that his optic nerves are dead. Despite it all, Elias never wavers, approaching each challenge with resilience, grace, and humor.

Alongside Elias, Youngblom faces her own challenges, staying by his side in the ICU for weeks, coordinating with other family members and friends, and never flagging in her care of her severely injured son, yet all the while coping with her own emotions, fears, and trauma. She struggles to support Elias, heal her self, and let him go on with his life. In this riveting memoir, Youngblom traverses her family’s lives before and after the accident, capturing the complications of grief, recovery, and the strength it takes to move forward—because we must.

“Because We Must is a lyrical, yet agonized guide to what it was like for author Tracy Youngblom to almost lose her young (in his twenties) son to the very definition of a senseless accident. For her, the task of taking care for Elias turned out to be twofold: one, the obvious, ensuring the medical attention he was too weak to ensure for himself, and second—here is where the true balletic movement occurs—the need to respect his boundaries and forge her own. The result is a tribute to the beauty and the power of the parent-child bond, devoid of sentimentality and full of heart.”—Madeleine Blais is a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and author of Queen of the Court: The Many Lives of Tennis Legend Alice Marble and In These Girls Hope is a Muscle