Synopsis

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.

Sunbury Press * Amazon

Guest Review by Nora

“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.”

Tragedy can touch any one of our lives at any time. This is something that, as humans, most have us have come to accept, or at least understand. But the sudden death of a loved one can still catch you off guard, changing your life in more ways than you could even imagine. Such was the case for author Rebecca Daniels when her husband of six years, Skip, died very suddenly of a heart attack in their home one fall evening.

Rebecca may not have been married to Skip for very long, but the love that the couple shared had already become an intricate piece of her everyday life. Accepting that Skip was gone and that she was going to have to find a “new normal” as people in her life often told her, became a step-by-step process for Rebecca, on which she would make a little more progress every day.

During this time, Rebecca kept a journal, and entries from that journal are included in the memoir as a way of giving a fuller picture of the rawness of her grief when it was still fresh.

Rebecca gives so much useful advice for dealing with grief as someone who has been through it. There aren’t many books on grief that are written from this perspective with so much practical advice.  I found this memoir both heartbreaking and hopeful in equal measure.

‘That Day and What Came After,’ is an invaluable resource for anyone who is dealing with grief and wants to know that they are not alone. This was a five-star read for me! I hope that Rebecca Daniels intends to write many more books!

Interview with Rebecca & Nora

Hi Rebecca, thanks so much for agreeing to this interview.

Describe yourself in five words

• Empathic, creative, thoughtful, gardener, grandmother

What fact about yourself would really surprise people?

• I used to deliver singing telegrams for a living

How do you work through self-doubts and fear?

• Methodically, slowly, carefully. I trained as an actor, so I imagine I’m playing the role of someone who is not doubting or afraid.

What scares you the most?

• The possibility of dementia as I continue to age.

 What makes you happiest?

• My grandchildren and puttering in my garden.

 Why do you write?

• To understand the world around me and to share my understandings with others.

 Have you always enjoyed writing?

• I wrote and illustrated my first “book” in elementary school about a trip our family took to Mexico. I have always written creative non-fiction and memoir.

What motivates you to write?

• Finding a story that engages me and that I think is worth sharing with others.

 What writing are you most proud of?

• The book I wrote about my parents during WWII is the one I’m most proud of. It let me discover a side of my parents that I never saw directly when they were still living.

What are you most proud of in your personal life?

• That I wrote three books, and without an agent found an excellent small publisher for them, all after my retirement from my university teaching career.

  What do you hope your obituary will say about you?

• That I was a caring and creative person (they might also call me a cat lady) who lived a good life and who was loved by her friends and family.

Do you recall what your husband’s said?

• There was a lot of detail in the official media obituary about Skip’s family history, his professional life (he had been a high school social studies teacher and had owned and run an Adirondack hotel for a number of years), and his survivors. It also said that his life in retirement had centered on family, especially his grandchildren, which was true.

 Location and life experiences can really influence writing, tell us where you grew up and where you now live?

• I grew up a free-range kid in a SW suburb of Portland, Oregon, on a large lot (that had possibly been part of a small farm at one time because it had lots of fruit and nut trees) in a tight-knit family-oriented neighborhood. I have retired to a semi-rural town in western Massachusetts to be near my grandchildren.

What else do you do, other than write?

• I garden (I recently turned my side yard into a pollinator garden under the trees and a meadow in the open area, which has been quite a fascinating adventure for the last several years), spend time with my grandkids (now teenagers), visit with friends, listen to audiobooks, enjoy the antics of my cats, practice yoga.

 What other jobs have you had in your life?

• When I was young and looking for work in the theatre, instead of waiting tables as many other would-be actors did, my “day jobs” were usually in offices. I delivered singing telegrams for several years in three cities (Portland, OR, Los Angeles and San Francisco, CA); I became a head hunter for a couple of years but learned that the business world was not a place I wanted to stay; I ran a small professional theatre for six years before going back to grad school to become a college professor of theatre, which was the job I retired from after almost 25 years.

 If you could study any subject at university what would you pick?

• I have pretty eclectic interests and learned a lot about arts and humanities in the process of getting three degrees (BA, MFA, PhD, all with a theatre focus) but would love to study more about psychology, comparative religions, and philosophy.

 If you could live anywhere in the world where would it be?

• Probably Ireland. Or Greece.

 Tell us about your family? Or extended family.

• I have a younger brother, sister-in-law, and two nephews (now in their thirties) on the west coast, and I try to visit out there as often as possible. Here in western Massachusetts, I live near my step daughter, son-in-law, and two grandchildren (both teenagers). I also have a number of close friends, many of them no longer living near me, that I consider members of my “family of choice.”

How do you write – lap top, pen, paper, in bed, at a desk?

• Nearly all my writing work is done in my recliner in my living room (though I think about what I’m going to write for several days before I finally sit down to write). Early drafts are written on my laptop, sometimes using a list of points I want to be sure to remember but nearly always in a stream of consciousness “brain dump” to get all my thoughts on paper. Revisions are done in colored pen (using lots of arrows, strike-throughs, and notes about things to add) on a printed draft using a clipboard before they are put on the computer (thank heavens for cut and paste functions).

Is there anyone you’d like to acknowledge and thank for their support?

• Each book has a different and often lengthy list of folks to thank. Though writing may seem like a solitary activity, it never happens for me without a lot of support and encouragement from trusted friends and fellow writers, especially my women writers group.

 Every writer has their own idea of what a successful career in writing is, what does success in writing look like to you?

• I’ve been very happy to get three books published after retirement (and a fourth by an academic publisher while I was working in the world of live theatre), but I’ve never thought much about financial success or having a best-seller. I know some writers do make a good living from their writing, but for me that has never mattered, which is a good thing since I never made much money from writing, even with four books currently in print. I just wanted to get my ideas out there to share with others.

Tell us about your new book? Why did you write it?

• My new book is a grief memoir about losing my husband unexpectedly, and I wish I hadn’t needed to write it at all. But I wanted to share my story because when I was widowed suddenly, I really needed to hear from others who had been down this grieving road before me, and there weren’t very many of those stories available to me at the time. So I thought if my experience could be helpful to others who find themselves in a similar position, it was worth sharing.

 If you could have a dinner party and invite anyone dead or alive, who would you ask?

• The only person I’d really like to invite to a dinner party these days is my deceased husband, who has been gone now for 14 years. I always loved sharing meals with him. He was often the cook, and a really good one at that, and an engaging conversationalist. I still miss him, even all these years later.

 When you are not writing, how do you like to relax?

• Reading (mostly listening to audiobooks), gardening, and visiting with friends.

What do you hope people will take away from your writing? How will your words make them feel?

• I don’t have an overarching message in my writing as a whole. Each piece tells a specific story that I hope will engage the reader and give her/him something to connect with.

Can you tell us about a really happy moment you had with your husband.

• We had the wonderful privilege of being able to meet and spend time with each of our grandchildren in the days immediately after they were born. We treasured those days as among the happiest days we had together and looked forward to many more.

How about a particularly sad one?

• One particularly sad experience we shared was the day we had to put down our beloved elderly cat, Jasper, because he had cancer. In spite of insisting that he was not a cat person, Skip cried so hard that the vet tech felt she needed to comfort him with a hug, while I held our furry friend so the vet could administer the fatal drugs. When we went home, we held each other and cried together for a long time. We decided that we were too sad to get another cat right away but agreed that we would definitely be doing that in the future months. We hadn’t gotten a new cat when Skip died suddenly, only a few months after the cat’s death, so that was one of the first things I did after attending to his memorials and his burial, naming my new furry companion Webster, which had been Skip’s middle name.

What kinds of things did you do together to enjoy leisure time together?

• We particularly enjoyed gardening together, though we each worked in different parts of the yard: he had large vegetable and herb garden beds, and I focused on the flowers and shrubs. After a productive day in the yard, we often enjoyed “drinks on the deck” as a reward before heading inside for dinner. We also enjoyed traveling together, including a seven-week-long cross-country drive to visit national/provincial/native parks in the US and Canada, and a trip to visit friends and family in England, Ireland, and France. We had a wonderful vacation with friends on the Maine coast just a couple of months before his death and were talking about future trips we wanted to make. In fact, we had already planned a cross-country train trip for the following spring to attend a nephew’s high school graduation.

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.

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