11/14/2025
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1A9CLvFafE/
I bought this book thinking it was about grief. It is. But it's also about joy, memory, ritual, and the fierce, impossible love between mothers and daughters. Suzy Hopkins wrote it for her daughter Hallie, who illustrated it, and together they created something so intimate it feels almost intrusive to witness—and yet you can't look away.
This is a love letter disguised as practical advice. It's a mother trying to stay present after she's gone, offering instructions for everything from how to unclog a drain to how to survive the days when the absence feels unbearable. Page after page, you realize: this is what it looks like when someone loves you enough to prepare you for their death while teaching you how to live.
1. The Practical Is Sacred
Suzy teaches Hallie how to do ordinary things—pay bills, make pie crust, fix a running toilet. But these aren't just life skills; they're acts of presence. When your mother teaches you to make her apple pie, she's giving you a way to conjure her in your kitchen years after she's gone. The practical becomes ritual, and ritual becomes remembering. Every instruction is really saying: you'll be okay without me, but you'll never be without me.
2. Grief Doesn't Follow Rules
There's a section on what to do when you're sad, and Suzy doesn't offer platitudes. She gives permission: cry in public if you need to. Stay in bed some days. Call her friends and talk about her. Eat ice cream for dinner. The honesty is staggering—she knows grief will be messy and long and will ambush her daughter at random moments for the rest of her life. So she normalizes it, makes space for it, refuses to pretend it will ever be fully "healed."
3. Joy and Sorrow Live in the Same House
What makes this book extraordinary is how it holds both devastating sadness and wild humor. Suzy includes advice on dating ("Don't settle"), career moves ("Trust your instincts"), and how to throw a party. She's preparing her daughter not just to survive her death but to *thrive* after it. The message: yes, you'll be gutted. And yes, you'll still laugh, fall in love, make mistakes, host friends, live fully. Both things are true.
4. Love Is What Survives
Hallie's illustrations—whimsical, tender, occasionally heartbreaking—show a daughter trying to hold onto her mother through art. Together, the words and drawings create something bigger than either could alone: proof that love doesn't end when bodies do. Every page whispers the same truth: death takes the person but not the relationship. Suzy will be gone, but her voice, her wisdom, her presence will live in Hallie's choices, her cooking, her grief, her joy.
This book is devastating and beautiful in equal measure. It's for daughters who still have their mothers and don't yet know what they'll lose. It's for mothers trying to figure out how to love beyond their own lives. It's for anyone who's ever lost someone and wished they'd asked more questions, learned more recipes, memorized more of the small things that become precious once they're gone.
Keep tissues nearby. You'll need them. Not just for the sadness, but for the overwhelming tenderness of watching someone try to make their love immortal through words and drawings. They succeeded. This book is proof that some things really don't die.
BOOK: https://amzn.to/4oIErDo
