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.

Brenda Miller is the author of six essay collections, including A Braided Heart: Essays on Writing and Form, Listening Against the Stone, and An Earlier Life, which received the Washington State Book Award for Memoir. Her work has received seven Pushcart Prizes. She co-authored, with Suzanne Paola, the textbook Tell it Slant: Creating, Refining, and Publishing Creative Nonfiction and co-wrote, with Holly J. Hughes, The Pen and the Bell: Mindful Writing in a Busy World. She is Professor Emerita of Creative Writing at Western Washington University and lives in Bellingham, Washington.