Without Her - A Chronicle of Grief

A lucid memoir reckoning with grief and the search for understanding in the wake of a sister’s suicide.Rebecca Spiegel is working as a teacher in New Orleans when she learns of her sister Emily’s death by suicide. Shocked, she flies back to Philadelphia. To family. To funeral preparations. To the service. Only after she leaves her parents’ house does the shock give way to grief.In the years that follow, Spiegel embarks on a physical, mental, and emotional voyage. She visits Emily’s dorm, digs through her computer. She parses old journal entries and emails. She recalls Emily’s visit to New Orleans mere days before her death, wondering what signs she might have missed. In documenting the last traces of her sister’s life, Spiegel also confronts their parents’ failings, as well as her family’s history of depression, anxiety, OCD, addiction, and disordered eating. She faces her own regrets too. “I wish I had untangled myself from myself,” she writes of her sister’s final visit. “I wish I had been able to see that I was okay and she wasn’t.”With each powerful detail resurfaced, Spiegel attempts to put into words what is incomprehensible. She plumbs the depths of her loss in an effort to understand her sister, to uncover logic where it is most elusive. What she finds instead is that there is no narrative on the other side of grief like this. There is no answer, no easy resolution—only those that leave, and those that keep living. Unflinchingly honest, visceral, and raw, this courageous elegy lays bare the hard realities of surviving the loss of a loved one.Review QuotePraise for Without Her“Rebecca Spiegel has written an aching testament to the unceasing compact that we must make each day anew when we have awakened to suffering, in the ones we love, in ourselves. Once known, it can never be unknown, and no matter how overwhelming our love, it can never take pain from another. With a clear and reverent honesty, Spiegel demonstrates that there is a way to live with this knowledge, and that is to claim suffering from fear, to speak of it, clearly, honestly, frankly. By documenting the ever-emerging marks that grief and loss will never stop inscribing onto the world of the living, by acknowledging that recovery is a never-ending spiral, she offers us an enduring form of love, of mercy.”—Inara Verzemnieks, author of Among the Living and the Dead“Without Her is a poignant memoir offered up in the tiny chunks of noticing that often accompany sudden grief. I swallowed Rebecca Spiegel’s book in one long gulp. Spiegel’s memories are so detailed I can’t help but sit beside her in her loss. This clear-eyed reckoning offers me a path toward understanding what always exists on the other side of grief: the joyful fact of a deep and abiding love.”—Camille T. Dungy, author of Soil“Without Her is one of the most sensitive, profound, and honest accounts of grief and suicide loss I’ve ever encountered. In beautiful and bracingly direct prose, Spiegel describes the indescribable experience of losing someone who has shaped your very sense of self. This book is a gift to those seeking to understand what it’s like to sift through the unanswerable questions left in the wake of a loved one’s suicide, or to anyone trying to keep going after losing someone they don’t know how to live without.”—Chris Stedman, author of IRL“For as often as we lament the course of grief in public, rarely do works of prose interrogate those representations as our own stories conform to stage rehearsals over experience. Rebecca Spiegel’s beautifully intricate memoir, Without Her, eschews the comforts of sentimentality in order to tell a different story, one which critiques our adherence to convenience and imprecision and instead asks what forms bereavement might take at the sentence level and how this might get us closer to true thinking and feeling, beyond the readily available beliefs about ourselves and our pasts. Spiegel is a master of quiet introspection, and Without Her marks an essential inquiry toward rethinking how we love and remember.”—Joseph Earl Thomas, author of God Bless You, Otis SpunkmeyerBiographical NoteRebecca Spiegel teaches writing in Philadelphia, where she lives with her family. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of North Carolina Wilmington, and Without Her is her first book.National media campaign, including television, radio, podcast, and print and online interviews, features, profiles, original essays, first serial placement, and op-edsNational radio campaign, including national and regional NPRWidespread galley distribution, include Goodreads giveawaysComprehensive Indies Introduce campaignConsumer advertising campaign at publication targeting top literary sitesOnline and social media campaign, including giveaways, and digital graphicsDedicated bookstagrammer and influencer galley mailingExtensive library and academic marketing including galley giveaways Author book launch in PhiladelphiaOutreach to national mental health organizations for partnerships including Suicide Prevention and Awareness Month (September)Newsletter promotion via the publisher to readers, sales and academic lists of more than 70K contactsPART 1It was March 26, a Wednesday. I was at work and it was the sixteenth birthday of one of my students: she brought in a cake covered in white frosting, pink sugar, and black stars, and I gave her a hug and a dollar, which—as is custom in New Orleans—she added to the other bills pinned to her school uniform hoodie. She left my classroom shortly before the lunch period ended; my cell phone rang. I glanced at the screen, rolled my eyes. It was my sister Emily’s college friend Z. The last time she’d reached out to me was to ask if I’d heard from Emily, but that was two months before, a few days after my sister was admitted to an inpatient program at a psychiatric hospital.“This can’t be good,” I said quietly to my co-teacher. I stepped out into the hallway, dragged my fingers across dips in painted cinderblocks, took the call.“Hello?”“Have you heard from Emily at all? I can’t get hold of her.” That same question—she was panicked.“No—not for the past couple days. I sent her a G Chat message on Monday, but she never answered.”I wasn’t alarmed. This wasn’t new. My sister was a bit slippery, hard to keep track of. Especially lately.“People are saying a body was found in a car on cam- pus, and I keep trying to call Emily, but her phone keeps going to voicemail and I’m freaking out.”“Okay. Okay. Hang on. Let me try to figure out what’s going on. I’ll call you back,” I said.I was calm and direct, but I could feel my thinking begin to cant. I’d graduated from the same college in Colorado two years earlier, and I still had the school chaplain’s number saved in my phone. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me to try to call Emily.The chaplain picked up, said, “Hello?”“Hi, this is Becca Spiegel.”Before I could say another word, he said, “Becca, I’mso sorry . . .” I heard words like “dead” and “family” and “legally, can’t initiate contact.” Flooded by hot disbelief and cold certainty, I asked him if I could tell my parents to call so he could tell them what he’d just told me. Asked him to tell Emily’s friend Z.I hung up, walked straight down the hall, through two doors, outside, sat down at a perforated picnic table, sur- rounded by concrete and aluminum, chain-link fence and rubber track, high school bleachers, 1.32 acres of artificial grass.I sent two identical text messages: one to my stepfather, one to my dad. “I need you to call the college chaplain here is his number xxx-xxx-xxxx.” The aim was neutral urgency. The shock split through my body, my mind was almost blank. Time hovered over earth like a fog.I called J. We’d begun dating during our senior year of college, then shared a home in New Orleans until he’d moved back to Colorado with his band two months ago, to finish writing an album and grow a vegetable garden. When I hung up, I had a missed call and new text message from Z: “The chaplains couldn’t tell me anything and she’s still not picking up. They said the parents might know though. I’m really sorry for calling like this.”I wrote back: “No it’s OK. Thank you for calling me. I asked the chaplain to tell you. It was her in the car. I’m so sorry.”My next thought was the flight to South Carolina I had scheduled for the next day, to run a 200-mile race from Columbia to Charleston as a member of a twelve-person relay team. I had been looking forward to the trip.I called the captain of the team. Tried to leave a voice- mail, but erased it accidentally. Sent a text instead: “I do not think I can get on a plane tomorrow. I will explain more, but I just found out my sister died. Please tell the team I am so sorry to pull out.”I went back inside the school building, straight to the windowless office of a school social worker with whom I worked closely, Ms. A—big heart, quick wit, no-bullshit attitude. She called everyone baby in the way many Louisianans do. My discussions with her were usually about how to best support the students we shared, but sometimes we talked about her own sister’s mental health history, and Emily’s.I knocked. Ms. A called for me to enter and I opened the door. She was wrapped in a cheetah-print Snuggie. (The school building was air-conditioned far too effectively.) Between us was a wide mess of desk: stacks of IEPs, framed photos of her two kids, potted plants. Tall, light gray file cabinets where all the paperwork would end up eventually. A lamp instead of the harsh, fluorescent lights. I couldn’t speak. I began to heave.“What’s wrong?” she asked.“It’s my sister . . . She’s dead.”She let out a breath and hugged me. She directed me to take a seat; her office became a concrete block–and-tile sanctuary. My stepfather called. He found a way to perform calm and steady. I asked if my mother knew yet, and he said yes. I asked if I should look at flights that would get me home that night. He said t