Antiphon ~ A Call and Response in a Year of Grief and Renewal

Two Women Find a Way to Save Each Other’s Lives

Two friends find themselves confronting life-shattering circumstances: the death of a child by suicide and a diagnosis of a glioblastoma brain cancer.

During the course of one year, these two women–one in New York City, the other in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado–embark on a deliberate correspondence to rescue themselves and each other from overwhelming grief. As the months pass, the act of writing and bearing witness to one another transforms each woman’s journey through terrible loss into a defiant affirmation of resilience and of a live well lived.

Antiphon: A Call and Response in a Year of Grief and Renewal (Ikaros Books). Available October 15, 2025 in bookstores and through Amazon.com

PRAISE FOR ANTIPHON

“In Antiphon: A Call and Response in a Year of Grief and Renewal, Jane Flynn and Christina Holbrook invite us into an intimate exchange shaped by sorrow, love, and the enduring threads of friendship. These luminous, echoing essays—born of personal loss and mortal reckoning—offer solace to anyone who has walked the canyons of grief and knows the rhythm of a broken heart.

With clarity and grace, the authors reveal not only the healing power of presence, but the quiet, life-affirming beauty that persists even in the midst of suffering.               

            –Karen Wyatt MD, author of 7 Lessons for Living from the Dying

            “What Antiphon offers is a glimpse into grief as a communal act. It tells the story of what happens when we don’t hide the truth of our suffering, when instead we sit side by side and allow the shared threads of our narratives to intertwine. And through this simple act of telling and listening, of call and response, a new story begins to emerge: one of friendship, hope, and transformational potential.”

            –Amanda Veale, award-winning editor and columnist, LUMINA, BLUESTEM, RUMINATE and the best-selling Finnish magazine, ANANDA.

            “A testament to the power of sharing our vulnerabilities in the face of devastating loss. During the course of a year, two lifelong friends struggle to orient themselves to their own grief and to a world that will never be the same. Their exchange not only reveals how opening ourselves to a trusted other can begin to mend our tattered souls, but beautifully illustrates the possibility for renewal and transformation through the act of communal self-exploration.”                                      –Marisol Montoya, LPC, CEAP Certified Grief Specialist and Senior Clinical Consultant, Employee Assistance Program

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

“We’ve been friends for over forty-five years, since high school,” Chris and Jane explain, remembering with humor their experiences as the awkward and unlikely co-captains of the Scarsdale High School JV Field Hockey team. Both women went on to attend Wellesley College outside of Boston. “But our adult lives took very different trajectories, and part of what this epistolary project allowed us to explore, as we reckoned with grief and mortality, were those experiences that we all share, that make us who we are as human beings: the desire for love, the challenge of navigating close personal relationships, the reality of grief and loss, the longing for a life of meaning.

“We have loved these months of corresponding with each other for the simple yet life-affirming feeling of having someone to walk with in the deep woods. We have come to believe that the conversation between us could resonate with others. And if this is so, then that is grace.”

Christina Holbrook. Christina graduated with a BA from Wellesley College and spent most of her career in New York City involved in the printing and publishing of art and photography books. She now lives in Breckenridge, Colorado, with her husband Alan Dulit. Christina has worked as a columnist for the Summit Daily newspaper in Colorado, and her short stories have appeared in a number of literary journals. All the Flowers of the Mountain, her first novel, was published by Sunroom Studios in 2022 and has received the 2023 Colorado Book Award for Romance, the 2023 IPPY Bronze Medal for Romance, and the 2025 IPPY Silver Medal for Fiction Audiobook. She is currently receiving care at UC Health Anschutz, University of Colorado Hospital.

Jane Flynn. Jane received her BA from Wellesley College, and her JD from Harvard Law School. She left family, friends and profession behind to follow her future husband to Athens, Greece, in 1990. After learning Greek, she spent the next thirty years raising two sons while navigating the services to support her younger son with autism. She cofounded an autism advocacy nonprofit and later served on the board of the Mediterranean Garden Society. Jane returned to New York in late 2020 following the death of her younger son by suicide. For several years she worked in Visitors Services for the Central Park Conservancy. Antiphon is her first published work.