From the TBR Pile: Blog Tour: Guest Post and Excerpt from That Day and What Came After by Rebecca Daniels

by Rebecca Daniels
Publisher: Sunbury Press (June 4, 2024)
Category: Non Fiction, Memoir, Death, Grief, Bereavement , Life Stages
Tour dates: September 9-October 8, 2024
ISBN: 979-8888192047
Available in Print and ebook, 182 pages

Amazon
Sunbury
What if you came home one day and found your husband dead in his favorite chair? This grief memoir explores the author’s experience of the unexpected death of her husband from sudden cardiac arrest a mere three months after his doctors had pronounced him hale and healthy. The author shares her experiences in the immediate aftermath of the abrupt shock of discovery, reminisces about the details of the couple’s late-in-life courtship and marriage, and imparts other experiences she has had along the grieving road in the years since becoming a widow.

In our society, we often don’t want to talk or even think about death, so stereotypes about widows exist. However, each person’s grief journey is unique, and sharing tales of those experiences can be helpful and useful for those who find themselves in a similar situation. Though not a self-help book, this memoir is the story of a widow who defied the stereotype that widows are expected to “get over it” and move on with their quiet lives. Instead, this widow “got through it” and is now sharing her journey in hopes of helping others in comparable circumstances.

Enjoy this guest review:

That Day and What Came After

Guest Review by Linda Lu

“Once I was alone and could let go of my self-imposed constraints,
I discovered by instinct what keening meant. I wept and wailed and
sobbed—deep, guttural sounds—as sorrow overtook me, and I rocked
and shook until I was exhausted.”

A stunning memoir from the author of some of the best books I've read in the last decade, 'That Day And What Came After,' is an intimate look at grief, pain and moving on in the wake of a tragedy.

Rebecca Daniels and her husband were only married for six years before his sudden and unexpected passing from a heart attack. Coping with the loss of her husband was not something that Rebecca thought she would have to do so soon into their marriage, and she found herself adrift, looking for help from any source.

Rebecca had experienced grief before in her life. As a young teenager, she lost her own father and watched as her mother dealt with young widowhood with few resources. Now that she was going through a similar experience, Rebecca decided to write this memoir as a guiding light for those that are also grieving a lost loved one.

After a loss like the one Rebecca experienced, there is a term that gets thrown a lot called 'the new-normal.' Or, rather, the new patterns that your life will fall into without that person around. Rebecca was told by more than one person that without her husband, her life would fall into a 'new-normal,' and she decided to document her 'new-normal' by writing about it in a journal. Excerpts from that journal are printed in the book, and the look at Rebecca's fresh grief is both shocking and strangely intimate.

This book could be a difficult read for some people, but I think that those people are the ones who would benefit from reading it the most. Even if you have never lost someone close to you, 'That Day And What Comes After,' is definitely worth the read!

Read an excerpt:

Excerpt From Chapter Eleven – Early Milestones (the First Few Years)

After I stopped writing regularly in my grief journal, I kept on writing, and what I wrote had a new, different format. By then, I knew I would write this grief memoir. Each of the shorter pieces were about experiences I had during my ongoing mourning, but they didn’t fit the format of the overarching narrative I had been crafting for the story of Skip and Rebecca. They were shorter and more focused on specific emotional memories and challenges. These experiences or thoughts that grief delivered to me over time didn’t hang together in a traditional narrative way, and they were not designed to be self-help advice for others. They were simply important milestones in my grief journey—intimate elements of my widow story—and I decided to share them. The result is the next two chapters, where these short essays are shared in a more or less chronological order.

PERSONAL GRIEVING RITUALS

(from November 7, 2010, to the present)

Grief rituals are the things we do to self-soothe when certain things remind us of our loss. Being a theatre person, at first, I created rituals that were more elaborate and formal, often involving candles, incense, photos, wine, music, and even speaking, though prepared words were few. For Skip’s birthday, which came only three and a half weeks after his death, I set up a small altar with his photograph, played his favorite music, toasted him with a glass of Bordeaux (one of our favorite wines and reminiscent of our trip to that city in France some years back), and spoke to him from my heart about how much I missed him. I did similar rituals for many of the important “firsts” without him in the year after his death.

In my daily life, I also created several smaller, more informal rituals, and though they have decreased in emotional impact as time passes, they will always help me remember certain things that I loved and still love. I remember thinking immediately after Skip died that I would never be able to count to ten again in the same way, because I lost the love of my life on the ninth day of the tenth month. I was right about that. Anything that required linear, mathematical thinking, and often things that didn’t, had me counting to ten in my head, saying, “I lost him on the ninth day of the tenth month” (instead of “nine, ten”). I counted the ice cubes I grabbed to fill a glass for a cocktail or iced tea, the crackers I pulled out of the box for a snack, how many seconds I would gargle after brushing my teeth, the number of times I ran the lip balm over my mouth, even how many spoonfuls of yogurt I would have for breakfast straight from the carton since I no longer needed to bother with a bowl. I started to count anything and everything. At first it was obsessive—any excuse to count to ten—and even now, more than thirteen years later, it still enters my mind now and then when I do the things I used to count in the early months after Skip’s death.

I also have a continuing relationship with the prismatic light that had bathed Skip’s body in what seemed like an otherworldly glow when I found him unresponsive in his chair. Those prisms had been created by the sun shining through an antique beveled, stained-glass window that hung near his favorite chair in our old home. It was then transplanted to the dining room of my new home near the kids a few years later. Whenever the sun creates those prisms on the walls and furniture, I always greet them as an embodiment of his spirit in my house, a house he’s never been inside in the flesh. I will often touch the wall where the prisms shine, letting the light play on my hands, and say, “Hi, Sweetie, it’s good to see you.”

When he was alive, in addition to being a consummate bartender, Skip was also the housemaid because while I was still working full-time, he had taken early retirement. That meant he was the one who did our laundry. I had one pair of comfortable cotton undies that had black polka dots on a white background, and he insisted they were his favorites, not because they were sexy but because the design let him know without having to put on his glasses when they came from the dryer inside out and needed to be turned to the right side before being folded and put away in the drawer. Yes, my husband folded the laundry! For the first several years after his death, whenever there was a family event or a special occasion I felt he would have enjoyed, I would wear those undies.

And last, but not least, there is the bartender’s signature cocktail: the Manhattan. It was always his favorite. Made with Canadian or rye whiskey, sweet vermouth, bitters, and a cherry, it’s still my cocktail of choice any time I want to feel Skip’s energy with me or think about a decision I would have consulted him over if he were still around to advise me, especially in matters of finance or investment, which had been one of his special talents. And sometimes for no reason that I can discern, I just need to pour myself a Manhattan to feel closer to him, counting out ten ice cubes in the process.

About the Author:

Award winning Author, Rebecca Daniels (MFA, PhD) taught performance, writing, and speaking in liberal arts universities for over 25 years, including St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY, from 1992-2015. She was the founding producing director of Artists Repertory Theatre in Portland, OR, directed with many professional Portland theatre companies in the 1980s, and is the author of the groundbreaking Women Stage Directors Speak: Exploring the Effects of Gender on Their Work (McFarland, 1996, 2000) and has been published in multiple professional theatre journals.

After her retirement from teaching, she turned her focus to creative non-fiction and began her association with Sunbury Press with Keeping the Lights on for Ike: Daily Life of a Utilities Engineer at AFHQ in Europe During WWII; or, What to Say in Letters Home When You’re Not Allowed to Write about the War (Sunbury Press, 2019), a book based on her father’s letter home from Europe during WWII.

Her second book with Sunbury, Finding Sisters: How One Adoptee Used DNA Testing and Determination to Uncover Family Secrets and Find Her Birth Family explores how DNA testing, combined with traditional genealogical research, helped her find her genetic parents, two half-sisters, and other relatives in spite of being given up for a closed adoption at birth.
Her newest book with Sunbury (2024) is a memoir about her late-in-life second marriage and sudden widowhood called That Day and What Came After: Finding and Losing the Love of My Life in Six Short Years.
Website: https://rebecca-daniels.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rebecca.daniels.9