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.

Excerpt That Day and What Came After by Rebecca Daniels

Excerpt From Chapter One – That Day

When I came in through our side door to the sunroom with my groceries, the image I encountered seemed normal at first glance. Skip was in his usual recliner, bathed in prismatic sunlight from the nearby beveled glass window. The Cartoon Network was playing but muted on the TV, and it looked like he must have snoozed out after his lunch, which was not unusual. There was a partial glass of seltzer on the table beside him and an apple with one big bite taken lying in his lap, where he must have dropped it as he dozed off. But when I called his name, he didn’t wake as usual, and there was something peculiar about the angle of his jaw, like it had unhinged at one corner, showing a section of back teeth I hadn’t seen before when he slept, even if his mouth was ajar while snoring. I pushed this image from my consciousness as one might push away a nightmare upon waking, but I was too late: it was burned onto the back of my eyelids for a very long time afterward. “Honey, wake up,” I called again, sharper and louder, but still he didn’t rouse, so I dropped the groceries on a chair and tried to shake him awake to no avail. He’d had a couple of alarming low sugar moments in the past couple of years due to his type 2 diabetes, so the cool clamminess of his neck when I touched it hinted this might be the problem today, but his face and arms were warm from the sun, so I didn’t know what to think or do next. But I knew I needed to call for help.

The 911 operator was calming and helpful. After dispatching the EMTs to my house, she directed me to get him out of the chair and onto the floor in case his airways were blocked from his position in the chair, but I wasn’t strong enough to move him. I must have started to sound panicked because the next thing she asked me was whether there was a friend or neighbor she could call for me. My next-door neighbor’s number was one of the very few I had memorized because we called each other so often. I rattled off the number, and the 911 dispatcher kept talking to me until my friend Diane arrived in just a matter of minutes. The ambulance and the EMTs were only a couple of minutes behind her. They got Skip out of the recliner and onto the floor, then went to work to figure out why he was unresponsive. Diane drew me into the nearby living room and onto a small couch where we were out of their way but could still see what was happening. One of the EMTs pulled out a manual device that looked like a soft football with a mouthpiece at one end (I later learned this was called an Ambu bag) and tried to help him breathe while the second EMT performed CPR. I remember hearing Diane whispering, “Did you see that? His chest is moving; he must be breathing,” but I couldn’t tell whether he was breathing, or the bag was breathing for him. The EMTs got Skip on a stretcher and had him out the door very quickly, and Diane ran next door to get her car while I sat in a daze, trying to grasp what was happening.

On the drive to the hospital, I remember calling my stepdaughter, Kensey, to tell her what had happened and that I’d call her again when I got to the hospital. She and I were no strangers to her dad being in the hospital, since he had a minor stroke followed by an emergency carotid endarterectomy three years before, and he’d had surgery for thyroid cancer two years ago, but this was his first medical emergency in a long time. In fact, his diabetes was well controlled with meds, he was now considered cancer-free, and all his doctors had pronounced him in tip-top shape at his annual exams within the past three months. Diane had been my driver on one of those other occasions, and she tried to lighten my apprehension by reminding me how well things had turned out the last time we took this drive to the hospital. When we got to the ER entrance, a nurse bustled us into a side waiting room instead of bringing us right into the patient area. “Your husband was just brought in, but I need to check with the doctor before bringing you inside.” Those words gave me a bad feeling, but I tried to keep my thoughts upbeat. After all, he’d been in this situation before and all had been well, but in the previous incident, he had been awake and joking by the time we got to the ER.

After just a few minutes, the nurse returned and asked us to follow her. She walked very close beside me, with Diane behind us, and as we entered the patient area, she whispered in my ear, “Sorry, honey, he didn’t make it.”

©Rebecca Daniels

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

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

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