In the Company of Grace

The son of a Black mother and white father overcomes family trauma to find the courage of compassion in veterinary practice Rising to accept a prestigious award, Jody Lulich wondered what to say. Explain how hed been attracted to veterinary medicine? Describe how caring for helpless, voiceless animals in his own shame and pain provided a lifeline, a chance to heal himself as well? Lulich tells his story in In the Company of Grace, a memoir about finding courage in compassion and strength in healingand power in finally confronting the darkness of his youth. Lulichs white father and Black mother met at a civil rights rally, but love was no defense against their personal demons. His mothers suicide, in his presence when he was nine years old, and his sometimes brutal fathers subsequent withdrawal set Lulich on a course from the South Side of Chicago to the Tuskegee School of Veterinary Medicine in Alabama to an endowed chair at the University of Minnesota, forever searching for the approval and affection that success could not deliver. Though shadowed by troubling secrets, his memoir also features scenes of surprising light and promiseof the neighbors who take him in, a brothers unlikely effort to save Christmas, his mothers memories of the familys charmed early days, bright moments (and many curious details) of veterinary practice. Most consequentially, at Tuskegee Lulich rents a room in the home of a seventy-five-year-old Black woman named Grace, whose wholehearted adoption of himand her own stories of the Jim Crow erafinally gives him a sense of belonging and possibility. Completing his book amid the furor over George Floyds murder, Lulich reflects on all the ways that race has shaped his life. In the Company of Grace is a moving testament to the power of compassion in the face of seemingly overwhelming circumstances.