Love You, Bye: A Daughter's Journey in Essays and Poems

Love You, Bye: A Daughter's Journey in Essays and Poems

A luminous collection of essays and poems about family, faith, and the art of saying goodbye from award-winning essayist, poet, and teacher Brenda Miller. In Love You, Bye , award-winning author Brenda Miller maps the territory of caregiving, loss, and unexpected grace. The title—drawn from the simple phrase she and her mother said to each other for years—captures the bittersweet essence of a book that finds profound meaning in the most ordinary expressions of love. At the center of this collection lies the story of Miller's journey as the "wayward daughter" who becomes the devoted caregiver to her aging parents, chronicling her father's gradual decline and her mother's final months with remarkable vulnerability. From the rituals of Passover to the silence of hospice rooms, from the mysterious appearances of tree frogs to the sacred work of singing at deathbeds, Miller weaves together the ordinary and the transcendent, often finding that the sacred is embedded in the mundane. Miller's voice moves seamlessly between prose and poetry, between humor and heartbreak, between the personal and the universal. She transforms the simple act of saying goodbye into an art form and the everyday language of love into something approaching prayer. Love You, Bye is essential reading for anyone navigating the complexities of aging parents, the mysteries of faith, or the simple courage required to keep loving in a world that can break our hearts. “In these radiant meditations on family, Brenda Miller moves through a lifetime of separation, regret, and hurt to find surprising redemption in caring for her aging parents. This collection is a prism of fondness.” —Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew, author of Writing the Sacred Journey , Living Revision , and The Release “Like light from a stained-glass window, this poignant reflection on daughterhood restores wonder to everything it touches. Miller sets her disparate shards of memory side by side, offering poems and lyric essays with a candid, generous hand until a shimmering portrait of hard-won adulthood emerges. Love You, Bye honors not only her beloved parents but the world as they taught her to observe it, with keen, unflinching, and joyous attention.” —Marjorie Sandor, author of Portrait of My Mother, Who Posed Nude in Wartime “Approach this book not as your typical collection of essays and poems, but as a jar of bright beads, cohesively combined yet individually shimmering as they catch the tender reflected light of their subjects: Miller’s aging parents foremost, as well as Miller’s own many stored selves from childhood to early old age. Long admired as an essayist of stunning invention and sensitivity, Miller had me nearly in tears from the outset and wouldn’t let me catch my shaky breath until the very last.” —Robin Hemley, author of How to Change History: A Salvage Project “To read Brenda Miller’s Love You, Bye is to be nestled within a hummingbird’s miraculous hum, reminding us that everyone and everything that leaves us returns anew. With startling precision, lyrical wonderment, and vulnerable viscerality, the essays and poems woven in Love You, Bye sing forth love and loss from a daughter in equal parts grief and nourishment. Miller writes with transformative intimacy, asking us to consider how we hold and are held by our beloveds, and in what shimmering light: ‘This book is my version of a yahrzeit candle, burning not just for my loved ones, but for all of yours as well.’” —Jane Wong, author of Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City “I love Brenda Miller’s Love You, Bye. I follow her through the surprises of caretaking—as unexpected as it often is—then the dying, the grief, and the resurrection of the spirit as if we were sisters, as if I were one of her Threshold Singers at the bedside of her dying father, her beloved dog, and then her mother. There’s an intimacy in this collection, interspersed poems lifting like the multicolored kite Miller installed in her father’s nursing home room. I see into the Jewish rituals from the point of view of an adult Bat Mitzvah. In fact, the poems and stories all have the feel of newness, all this happening for the first time. There’s a freshness in the telling. Life is a surprise.” —Fleda Brown, author of The End of the Clockwork Universe “Love You, Bye is an extraordinary book. Beautifully written, with an honesty that is both sensitive and searching, it is an elegy and praise song for Miller’s late parents and a remarkable self-portrait of a ‘wayward daughter’ who has come into the capacious heart of her fullness. A sister ‘wayward’ girl, I was often in tears as I read, recalling my own losses, yet glad to be reminded that ‘to die is not to disappear but to be present in ways our earthly selves could never imagine.’ To read this elegant book is to be transformed by its wisdom and beauty.” —Alison Townsend, author of The Green Hour: A Natural History of Home “‘You might return someday. Who knows / what will lure you back to th