Our Long Goodbye

In this deeply emotional memoir, a grieving daughter bonds with her father’s best friend of eighty years—and reconnects with her father—through the stories her unlikely new friend shares with her.

From the moment Teri Drobnick’s father is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, she feels like he’s slipping away. As she grapples with an uncertain future and the steady erosion of his memory, Teri leans on Uncle Bob—her dad’s best friend of eighty years.

As Teri navigates the emotional limbo of caring for a parent with dementia, she and Uncle Bob, united by mutual grief, form a deeper bond from the stories he shares of his lifelong friendship with her father. Beginning with their boyhood during World War II, Uncle Bob recounts first dates, college at UC Berkeley, marriages, building a business, raising children, surviving loss. In the present, Teri confronts the anger, loneliness, and role reversal that accompany memory decline—but through tales of the past, she finds a way to reconnect with her father. 

With a narrative braided between past and present, Our Long Goodbye is a poignant love letter from a daughter to her father that explores anticipatory grief, enduring friendship, and the profound power of shared memory.