Two Books that Help Untangle Grief

And When Did You Last See Your Father?: A Son’s Memoir of Love and Loss by Blake Morrison (1994) Changed My Life Then and Still Does, Thirty-Two Years Later

GUEST CONTRIBUTOR AMY GOLDMACHER Three weeks after my father’s death from pancreatic cancer, I had gone to cold and damp London to start my college junior year studying abroad. I couldn’t mourn there, sharing a tiny one-bedroom flat with two other girls, above a video store in Earl’s Court that played Mariah Carey’s “Dreamlover” every night as they closed up at eleven o’clock, loud enough for us to hear it upstairs. I kept my grief to myself. I didn’t see anyone else around me who had a parent who had died. I felt so alone.

Until, in a Waterstones bookstore, I saw Blake Morrison’s memoir And When Did You Last See Your Father? perched on a paperback display. I bought that book and read it over and over because, even though the author wasn’t like me (he was older, male, and English), he had watched his father get sick and die, like I did. 

I saw my experience mirrored in his: the oscillation between memories of a vibrant parent and images of a dying patient and the struggle to make sense of it. As a twenty-year-old, I didn’t have the language to express what I needed, but this book let me know I was not the only one who had gone on this journey. 

I carried this book with me across an ocean and all around the country through a dozen moves. From London back to college in Iowa. To my mother’s home in exurban New York State before I found my first real job and apartment in Boston. To Los Angeles for work, and then to graduate school in Detroit, and beyond.

I gave a copy to a colleague who lost his father to cancer, because I thought it would help him feel less alone. I shared my copy with my husband when his father died. Welcome gifts for the ever-increasing new members of a club no one wants to be in.

Dad and Daughter, 1987

I revisited this book many times over the years. I read it for different reasons and occasions, like on the anniversaries of my father’s death, like when he had been gone longer than I had known him alive, like when I see my own behavior patterns from childhood repeating in my adult life.

As I approached the same age my father was when he was diagnosed, I needed to know: would I share his fate? To find an answer to that question, I did something he never had the chance to do: I took a genetic test. 

I learned my ATM gene has a pathogenic mutation, an alteration with sufficient evidence to be classified as capable of causing disease. Research suggests that people who carry a mutated copy of the ATM gene may have an increased risk of developing several types of cancer, including pancreatic. Guidelines and testing protocols are updated every year as new information is learned. 

The ATM gene was discovered in 1994, the same year my father died, the same year Morrison’s memoir found me.

Morrison’s book not only accompanied me on my long journey with grief, it was a model as I wrote my own memoir, Terms & Conditions. In it, I interrogate and untangle my grief and anxiety as I figure out its implications on my health, wellness, and relationships. Studies show that roughly 5% of people carry genetic changes linked to cancer risk. It’s important to me that others are able to see themselves in books so they don't feel they are alone, as Morrison’s memoir did for me. 

If you lost a parent at a young age, if you have inherited cancer risk, if you are learning how to let go of what no longer serves you: you are not alone.

Though Morrison’s story doesn’t include any discussion of inherited cancer, it was the first book I encountered about processing a parent’s death. It helped me understand my loss and showed me how to move forward. Morrison’s book was my lifeline when I was most unmoored, and it has been a companion for over thirty-two years. I still return to it when I need to be reminded that grief changes over time, that good memories endure, and that the terms and conditions we grew up with don’t have to determine the rest of our lives.  

About the Author

Amy Goldmacher’s creative work has appeared in The New York Times, Essay Daily, Monkeybicycle, and dozens of literary journals and anthologies. She won the 2022 AWP Kurt Brown Prize in Creative Nonfiction, and her experimental glossary-form memoir, Terms & Conditions, published by Stanchion Books (October, 2026). She lives in South Florida.