Marisa Bardach Ramel wrote a book with her dying mother
The Goodbye Diaries published 17 years after Sally Bardach's death from cancer
When Marisa was 17 years old, her mother, Sally, was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer and given two months to live. Nine months into Sally’s chemotherapy, she called Marisa at Syracuse University, where she was a freshman in college, and presented her with a big idea: “Everyone keeps telling me to write a book, but I don’t think I can write one on my own. What if we wrote one together?”
Seventeen years after Sally’s death, The Goodbye Diaries is finally out. Told through first-person narratives from a teenage Marisa and a weakening Sally, it’s an intimate look at a mother-daughter relationship that has to rapidly adapt to face an imminent, wrenching loss. (You can read more about how I personally related to the book here.)
Below, read an excerpt from the book, when Marisa’s father, angry at the way Marisa withdrew from Sally after her diagnosis, rips her phone from the wall, and Marisa must confront the reality her family is in. Then, read a conversation between Marisa and I about revisiting loss after so many years, and the shiny side of grief.
Excerpt from The Goodbye Diaries
“Billy, stop it!” Mom shrieks, seemingly out of nowhere.
Stunned, our heads swivel toward the upstairs landing. Mom’s standing at the top step, scowling down at us, with messy hair and an oversize T-shirt. We hadn’t even noticed she was there. She looks so fragile, but we’re both too angry to stop.
“No!” Dad yells, eyes darting angrily from me to Mom. “She needs to be there for you and instead she’s talking on the phone for three hours!”
“It was not three hours!” I yell back.
He glares at me, pure fury again, and I brace myself for what he says next.
“You’re being selfish,” he sneers, each word deliberate and slow. “Mom is sick, and this is how you act? I’m ashamed of you. I’m ashamed you’re my daughter.”
“Billy, don’t say that,” Mom yells.
“STOP IT!” I scream, squeezing my eyes shut and covering my ears. It’s that wall-shuddering scream, and this time it’s loud enough to make them both stop and stare at me, bewildered. I have the floor, but I have no idea what to say. I want to prove to them that I’m not the selfish girl they think I am. That I’m still the girl I used to be. “Beautiful inside and out,” as my mom used to say. But I’m too hurt that they’ve stopped thinking of me that way. I’m too mad that they’ve abandoned me at the first sign of me being anything less than the do-gooder I’ve always been. I’m too worried that if they see me as bad, then that’s who I’ll become, and we’ll all be broken forever.
“Do you want me to kill myself?” I try to yell, but my voice catches, and it comes out like a moan. “Is that what you want?”
“Missy, don’t talk that way!” Mom shouts, her voice shrill. “Billy, look what you did, don’t you see she’s upset?”
Sobbing, I lean against the wallpaper and let my back slide down the wall until I’m sitting on the ground, knees up to my chin. I haven’t cried since Mom was diagnosed, and now my throat can barely swallow against the tears and mucus and screams.
My parents continue bickering about who’s being too hard on me (Dad) and who’s letting me off too easy (Mom). Until they seem to realize they’ve gotten sidetracked from the person they’re actually upset with: me. I’m still crying, partially because I don’t really know what else to do and I keep expecting Mom to come downstairs and comfort me, but instead she looks at me—hard. Ashamed, I stare at my knees, hugging them to my chest.
“I need to know if you’re going to be there for me or not,” Mom says in a deep, dead-serious voice that’s even more frightening than Dad’s roar.
The silence following the screams is eerie, and I realize they’re waiting for an answer. A real answer from me. And I don’t know what my answer is.
Excerpt from The Goodbye Diaries reprinted by permission of Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing.
We need to talk
Jillian Anthony: You set this book down for years before picking it up to work on it again. What was it like revisiting this time period a decade later?
Marisa Bardach Ramel: I was piecing together the book in my early twenties, then I took a break for a few years and thought that maybe the book had just been a cathartic thing. I moved in with my boyfriend and got engaged and got married. I was entering this happy phase in my life, and I didn’t know how to work on this sad book in a time I was really happy. A a year after we got married I said, “I think we should try to have a baby,” and he said, “I don’t think I’m quite ready to do that yet,” and I said, “Okay, maybe I’ll finish that book.” In that next year I finished the last two-thirds of the book. It just was a time in my life when I could work on it and feel like I was in a really different place emotionally. I now had this supportive husband who I lived with and a small second bedroom we had set up as a writing studio, and I could go in that room and play all this music from the early 2000s and read all my mom’s journals and really go back in time. It felt like sacred time I was spending with my mom.
The book ends just before your mother’s death. How did you process your grief in the years afterward?
My mom died when I was 20, between my sophomore and junior year of college. College is probably the weirdest place to be when you’re grieving. You’re with all young people and all they want to do is have fun, and you’re in a place where you don’t even know how to have fun anymore. I started dating someone new and for a long time I didn’t tell him that my mom had died. I wasn’t sure if he knew or not, and I kind of liked the idea that maybe he thought she was still alive and I just didn’t talk about her much. I was very happy to graduate from college. I had none of that feeling of the “best years.” I was like, these have probably been the worst four years of my life. I was very excited to go out and be an adult because I felt I had already been forced into an early adulthood, and having a job and being independent from my family would feel like it fit better. And it did. I lived at home for a year, which was very painful for me, to live at home without my mom there, then I moved out to Brooklyn. I was going through all these life milestones without the person there who would normally be guiding you and being excited for you. It wasn’t really until I turned 30 and I got married, and then especially in the past few years when I had kids—a 4-year-old son and a daughter who just turned one—that’s really been the most settled I have felt in my life and myself since my mom died.
I haven’t had a loss like yours, but I have heard that it takes about a decade to even out to who you were before.
I think most people don’t know that and there’s a lot of expectation to be healed and move beyond that, and I think you do find some of those things, but it’s not so wrapped up in a bow as we’d all like it to be. The person grieving doesn’t want to be grieving. Everyone wants to get over it, but it’s more difficult than it seems.
When you were first going through that time in college, do you remember anything you were reading or listening to that helped you a lot?
I’m a former drummer and played in a lot of rock bands in college, and I feel like music is always something that has felt like a comfortable way of feeling like my emotions could be echoed in something else. It was the early 2000s so it was the height of emo bands. It was music like Jimmy Eat World, At The Drive-in, Dashboard Confessional, Death Cab for Cutie, and Bright Eyes—all of these really confessional, depressing lyrics. Listening to them kind of felt like someone was commiserating with me. I remember reading A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and that book opens with the story of Dave Eggers’ parents dying of cancer. It was the first time I saw someone also in their early twenties trying to navigate life, for him, without both of his parents. There were scenes in that book that I was like, Oh, I went through that. He gives voice to all the things you see as a child of someone who has cancer that no one really talks about and there’s no one to talk about it with; it’s all too uncomfortable and gross. I was already working on this book that my mom and I were writing together and it helped me see, Oh, there’s other books like this.
Now that you have dipped back into your relationship with your mom, what does your grief feel like for you now?
The book came out in May, and it felt like the last two months have been an intense dive back into my grief. For so long every year, when it was her birthday, the anniversary of when she died—every holiday was just so much about missing her and about the pain of losing her. And when my son was born, and now having a daughter and having that mother-daughter relationship again, the grief lost a lot of that rough edge. It just stopped being so acute. I started accepting more that my mom died when I was 20 and that’s how my life went. It’s also hard to separate my life since she died with the fact that she died, because, would I have married my husband, or would I have fallen for someone else? And if I didn’t marry him, would I have these kids or no kids at all? It feels like a domino effect and it makes it so that you can’t really wish you’d go back in time and have her not die, because you’d influence all the things that come after it and all the things I like about my life. The book coming out has thrown a bit of a wrench into those feelings of acceptance in that it just sort of forced me to focus in on that time of when she died. It’s a little hard to go there again. I think I’m struggling with, who am I now? Am I still the grieving girl, or am I a girl who was grieving and can help others with grief through this book, or am I both?
I suppose you’ll always be both, right?
That might be the definition of acceptance and why it’s such a bitch. You have to accept the duality of life. I’ve had to accept that I can miss my mom and still have a relationship with my stepmother, as an example of that duality. I can love my stepmother and still get annoyed sometimes that she’s not my mom. I can be so thankful that I have my dad and still get frustrated that he’s not my mom. We all want things to be more black and white. I have found that grief is just one big gray area, and I’m still finding my way through it.
You mentioning the duality of it is particularly interesting to me. There is a brightness to grief—being in touch with your feelings and how much you loved someone and even working your way through it. Were there particular times you felt that shininess of grief?
I never thought about grief in that way until recently because a friend who also lost her mom to pancreatic cancer read my book and she said to me, “I was reading the chapter about you and your mom buying your prom dress together.” Her mom died in her later twenties and so she was like, “I don’t even remember buying my prom dress. I probably went to the mall with a girlfriend or something, but for you, because you were in this moment of grief, it took on such meaning and it became this indelible memory for you and for your mom and this experience together.” I just hadn’t thought about it because it’s hard for me to imagine what prom dress shopping with my mom would have been like without that, if it had just been “normal.” In some ways my friend saying that gave me a kind of gratitude for those years of my life. It clarified it for me, because I was too close to it to really see.
More about the author: Marisa Bardach Ramel is co-author of The Goodbye Diaries: A Mother-Daughter Memoir (Wyatt-MacKenzie, May 2019), written with her late mother Sally Bardach. She is a former magazine editor who has written for Seventeen, Prevention, Glamour, PopSugar, xoJane, and more. She lives in Brooklyn, NY with her husband and two children. You can follow her on Instagram (@marisa.bardach.ramel), Facebook (@mbardach), and Twitter (@mbardach), and see more about the book at goodbyediaries.com.
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