I read Lisa Romeo’s Starting with Goodbye: A Daughter’s Memoir of Love after Loss while I taught Hamlet and could not stop comparing these texts, which share a few striking similarities, including father loss, a fatherly spirit who converses with the living, and head-on interruptions of cultural silences imposed on the bereaved. The first rule broken, of course, is the ban on speaking openly about the existential crisis that ensues when one confronts mortality.
Most famously, the grave-digging scene in Hamlet forefronts the image of a skull (poor Yorick!), a famous Renaissance momento mori, to remind audiences that finite borders mark life as precious. It is because we will die that life calls us to attention.
Therein lies the rub. After her father’s death, Romeo’s once cherished parental safety net disappears, even if this safety net had grown tenuous and complicated by geographic and emotional distance, as well as Romeo’s responsibilities for her own family. Much of Starting with Goodbye compels me, but this rumination undid me. And I suspect other children who’ve lost parents will relate.
In the interest of full disclosure, I should share that I have a few things in common with Romeo, including sharing an alma mater (Syracuse University’s S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications), parent loss (although I was twenty-one when my mother died) and producing writing that is also invested in candid, public conversations about grief.
What I find most valuable about Starting with Goodbye is how this book shatters grief myths to expose bereavement experiences that often go unacknowledged within American life. For example, there’s the quiet relief a child might feel, and that Romeo confronts, when a parent dies after a long or deteriorating illness.
There’s the truth that our absent loved ones are ever-present. They are dead and never truly gone. A corpse might become a ghost, as in Hamlet, a memory, or a lingering and difficult-to-name presence who shows up to chat, as is Romeo’s experience.
Her narrator never defines these unexpected fatherly apparitions, nor does she label them as paranormal but simply notes, “We talk, my dead father and I.” And her chapter “What Happens in Vegas” contends with these unexpected father-daughter conversations, funeral ephemera, and the deaths of celebrities who remind Romeo of her father.
In turn, Romeo’s ruminations amplify the emotional complexities of early mourning, when there is no rulebook or how-to manual for how to get this right, despite American culture’s insistence on five tidy consecutive stages of grief.
At the chapter’s conclusion, Romeo remarks on the deaths of celebrity icons who remind her of her father, and whose losses trigger new experiences of grief. Her point? Grief is not a straight line with a fixed beginning or end. It’s more like a wave or a ripple, more like a surprise.
“As each one of these old men dies or fades from public life, I designate others to take their place, men slightly older than my father was at his death, older than he ever got to be,” she writes.
For me, these musings were most welcome and powerful. My mother resembled Mary Tyler Moore, and they both lived with type 1 diabetes. When the actress died last year, I felt, for a moment, like I’d lost my mother again. Romeo’s candor normalized my own reaction, and gave me a model for a grief experience where I’ve rarely found appropriate models.
Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking was published following my mother’s death—and Romeo references this book, which has become a seminal grief-text of our time, comparable to C.S. Lewis’ A Grief Observed in the twentieth century. But I find Starting with Goodbye more helpful because of Romeo’s wry wit, which offers a much needed cultural critique.
In her chapter “Leaving Las Vegas,” she examines then discards hollow platitudes that, at the level of language, illuminate a cultural tendency to erase or project positivity onto experiences of grief and loss. Platitudes appear in italics, followed with Romeo’s plain text critiques.
As I read these lines, I thought once more of ghosts—of grief as a kind of haunting where language fails to adequately capture or categorize experience. In Romeo’s story, ghosts are more symbolic, more speculative than literal. And yet, as in Hamlet, the possibility of a ghost speaks to a child’s longing. Even in adulthood, we need our parents.
However, I worry that “burden” has negative connotations that contribute to our cultural tendency to avoid and deny death. I prefer thinking about grief as a relationship like any relationship, a commitment borne out of love. For seventeen years, I have mourned my mother in direct proportion to my love for her. Grief keeps us connected. Death is not the end of a relationship, but a turning point, as evidenced by Romeo’s title: Starting with Goodbye.
Perhaps this is why I’ve already planned to give copies of her memoir to friends, family, and students beginning their own grief journeys.
In American culture, where talk of death is still taboo, we need more stories about the aftermath of loss, about what it means to live with candor in the face of grief. We need stories that speak with frankness about parental death. We need writers like Romeo to start a new conversation, to keep it going.
1) Great review! I’ve in the midst of a strong memoir addiction so I think I will have to pick this one up.
2) I lived in Frederick MD for a few years and absolutely adore that town. It remains the most magical and my all time favorite place I’ve lived.
3) Finish that memoir! I’m in the midst of mine as well (that deals with the loss of a parent as a child) – and I hope to have a first draft completed this year. Hopefully this book will help in the “research” since structure has been my sticking point.
Thank you, and I get the memoir structure quandary. It’s a beast. Love living in Frederick, and agree it is a magical place.
Thank you. What a wonderful review. Wish I’d stumbled upon this writer when I lived in Frederick, Md. Will definitely follow her blog and look forward to her memoir.
Thank you, Rebecca & sorry I missed meeting you in Frederick, Md.
Wonderful review, Magin. Can’t wait to meet you!
Thanks so much, Ryder. See you soon!
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