That Day and What Came After: Finding and Losing the Love of My Life in Six Short Years

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

Description That Day and What Came After by Rebecca Daniels

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.

Praise That Day and What Came After by Rebecca Daniels

“Author Rebecca Daniels and I have a lot in common, We both found and married our husbands a bit later in life. We both had our marriage stories cut short in an instant by death, and we were both widowed by cardiac arrest.

I needed the soothing and validating words that Daniels provides as she gently and lovingly walks us through what it’s like to be suddenly widowed. In addition to her grief story, Rebecca gives us a beautiful glimpse into the love story between her and Skip, and as readers, we almost feel as if we are losing him too.

As a writer, Rebecca has a way of making the words flow, so that reading them feels less like an effort and more like floating or being guided along.”- Kelley Lynn, Certified Grief Counselor, viral TED talk speaker, and author of My Husband Is Not a Rainbow: the brutally awful, hilarious truth about Life, Love, Grief, and Loss.

“That Day And What Came After is a moving story of a love found later in life and lost too soon. In this memoir, Rebecca contemplates deeper questions and chronicles navigating the minutiae of day-to-day life after losing her beloved partner. Heartbreak and loneliness are tempered by found family and precious memories. By turns sorrowful, hopeful, and reflective.”- Natalie Pinter, author of The Fragile Keepers

Praise Finding Sisters by Rebecca Daniels

“I was intrigued how the author was able to use DNA and other investigative measures to find what she could about her biological family. I admired her courage and persistence in continuing her search. It was fascinating to see what she discovered, who she met along the way, and how she was able to deal with the information. I enjoyed reading how it all unfolded. I loved it.”-Amy,

Locks, Hooks, and Books

“Finding your roots can be a tricky subject, but for the author, Rebecca Daniels, it became a life mission of finding her roots. Her entire journey is neatly documented, giving others who have the same desire to follow through on their journey. Every detail blends well with her story, which gave me a genuine appreciation of her experiences.”-Lynelle, Inspire To Read

“Finding Sisters is an excellent example of what it takes to solve a family mystery. Yet it’s also a captivating story of human relationships in the age of secrecy-revealing DNA databases. As Rebecca Daniels so skillfully illustrates.

By sharing her thoughts and insights throughout this journey, Rebecca makes the story refreshingly honest and personal. Like no other DNA success story, Finding Sisters uses footnotes and family tree diagrams to show exactly how the search unfolds. This makes the book a clever hybrid of a memoir and a case study.”-Richard Hill, Author of "Finding Family: My Search for Roots and the Secrets in My DNA"

“In Rebecca Daniels’ memoir Finding Sisters, she takes us on her personal journey for answers surrounding her adoption, birth family, and ancestral heritage and introduces us to genealogy research and the increasingly popular genealogy websites that make familial matches from DNA databases.

Of all the encounters and relationships, she chronicles during her search. This book is not just ideal for those interested in genealogy research and ancestry websites, but also those wanting to uncover more of what makes them who they are. And isn’t that all of us to some degree?”-Maia Williamson, author of Where the Tree Frogs Took Me

That Day and What Came After

Guest Review by Laura

“I had started to notice a great deal of repetition in my journal entries; some of the phrases were reappearing almost verbatim because I had run out of new ways to express the issues that continued to press in on me,

though I also noticed that I had less need to use writing to feel better.

My grief was diminishing in small but palpable ways, though I was still not ready to let go of it yet.”

By the time you have finished this book, you will understand grief. 'That Day and What Came After,' by Rebecca Daniels is a memoir about that horrible thing that perches on your heart, that emotion that never really goes away: grief over the loss of a loved one.

Rebecca Daniels married her husband, Skip when they were both in their 50's and, after only six short years of happiness, the worst happened. Daniels arrived home one crisp Fall day to find that Skip had passed away in his recliner.

Daniels' memories of the events that came immediately after are foggy and disjointed. She remembers going to the hospital, finding out that Skip had already died before she arrived home, that he had most likely died peacefully and felt no pain. She only remembers pieces of things like returning home alone and the funeral days later.

The fog of grief is so well represented in this book that I found myself grieving along with Daniels, despite having never known Skip.

I had a feeling that I was going to be moved by this memoir, as I have read two of Daniels' other books in the past and found them both to be so beautifully written that they have stayed with me for years after I was done reading.

That was the same thing that happened with 'That Day and What Came After.’

It will stay with me for a very long time to come! 5 stars

About Rebecca Daniels

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

Buy That Day and What Came After by Rebecca Daniels

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Interview With Rebecca Daniels And Laura

Hi Rebecca, welcome to CelticLady’s Reviews. Thanks so much for agreeing to this interview

Laura: Please tell us something about the book that is not in the summary.

Rebecca: The summary suggests that the book “imparts other experiences (I) had along the grieving road” but doesn’t detail them. One unusual experience I shared in the second part of the book involved my cat and yoga breathing, as the cat tried his best to get me to stop focusing on deep breathing and pay more attention to him.

Laura: Can you share a particularly happy memory/experience that you had with your husband?

Rebecca: Many of our happiest memories were quiet times at home, but we did have a wonderful trip early in our marriage to Napa Valley in California for winery visits and tastings, which was a delightful experience for us both. In one of those tasting rooms, we met and were able to talk with an NFL football player and his wife, also on vacation, which was very exciting for my husband who was an avid football fan.

Laura: What words do you use over and over that drive your editor crazy?

Rebecca: I’ve never been told by any of my editors that I drive them crazy, but I do know that most editors are always alert for the use of unnecessary adverbs (especially “very” or “really”), which I am careful to do my best to remove before my manuscript gets to the professional editing stage.

Laura: Using the title of your book as an acrostic, describe your work or yourself.

Rebecca: I do a lot of word puzzles but have never done acrostics, so I think I’ll skip this question.

Laura: How has being an adoptee impact how you write.

Rebecca: It hasn’t, to my knowledge. Why would it?

Laura: What writers have you drawn inspiration from?

Rebecca: I have been a reader my whole life, and I have lots of different published authors that I have admired in my life, but the writers who have given me the best sources of immediate inspiration for my three most recent books (all in the creative non-fiction or memoir genre) are the women writers in my local writing group. All are accomplished writers in their personal and/or professional lives but few are published.

Laura: What other inspirations do you draw from?

Rebecca: I write about real life individuals and events, and my teaching career was focused primarily on live theatre, so the stories and circumstances of others are always fascinating to me. Other inspirations, speaking more broadly, are nature (both the wilderness and my own back yard) and music (lots of different genres, according to my moods), both of which feed my soul and give me the energy to focus intently on my writing.

Laura: How long did it take you to write this book from concept to fruition?

Rebecca: I wrote on social media immediately and regularly after my husband’s death, but it was a few years later that I was finally able to start writing anything worth reading as other than online venting. At that time, I was in the middle of writing a book about my parents, so I kept putting off writing the harder and more emotionally revealing parts of my grief story. My genealogy story also jumped in line ahead of the grief memoir because it, too, was emotionally easier to work on. Once those two projects had been delivered to the publisher, there were no further excuses I could make for avoiding the hard work, so I finally got serious about the grief memoir, which took a couple of years in various drafts before it was ready to be sent to the publisher and then another year or more before it went through all the stages of their pipeline to final publication this year.

Laura: Tell us about your cover. Did you design it yourself?

Rebecca: I did not do the actual design work, but I did suggest the notion of using a photo of the gravestone or some other kind of memorial marker (I had several to share) with the title letters superimposed.

Laura: Where did you get the inspiration for your cover?

Rebecca: I studied covers of similar books to discover that most of them had abstract cover designs, so that got me started thinking about how to make something concrete and directly personal for me into a more abstract design. I didn’t have the graphic skills to do it myself, but I could imagine it. Thankfully, so could my cover designer.

Laura: What do you do when you are not writing?

Rebecca: I’m retired, so my time is often spent in reading, gardening, visiting with friends, and enjoying time with my two grandchildren.

Laura: Can you tell us about your challenges in getting your first book published?

Rebecca: The very first book I had published was a book about women stage directors and was published by an academic press. Because that was my speciality field and I was reasonably well-known among other college theatre professors at the time, I didn’t have much trouble getting that book published. It was an expectation of my job. The transition to writing creative non-fiction and getting that published was much harder. My first book in that genre was a book about a support soldier’s experience in WWII, based in my father’s letters home to my mother during his military service in North Africa and Italy. Because I was not a military scholar, nor was I represented by an agent, I had to look for other publishers who might be interested. And because the story fell in the category of “human interest stories” rather than “battle narratives” (what most who already published war stories wanted), fewer publishers were interested. So, I got many rejections in a period of about six months of regular queries to various small publishers before I found one that wanted to take a chance on my story. Lucky for me, that same publisher was interested in publishing my other new books as well.

Laura: What was your first job?

Rebecca: Like many other girls my age, I was a regular babysitter for some of the younger kids in my neighbourhood. My practice “real” job was as a library page in high school (entirely volunteer, but made me feel grown up and serious), and my first job with a real paycheck in the summer after my first year in college, was as an entry-level clerk in the office of a local textbook depository.

Laura: What are you currently working on?

Rebecca: I’m working on a series of essays about various interesting (to me) experiences in my life that I’m calling a “mosaic memoir.” Not sure it will ever add up to another publishable book, but it has been lots of fun, and a couple of the essays are being considered for possible publication by very different kinds of magazines or journals.

Laura: Is there a question that you would have liked me or another blogger to ask but didn't? If so, please ask and answer.

Rebecca: Nope, this interview has been thorough and lots of fun. Thanks.