In Learning to Say Goodbye, Alexandra Dionisio begins with the phone call telling her that Kathrin, her closest friend since childhood, has died in a car accident. The news returns Alexandra to an earlier loss, when her mother died after cancer and left her wishing they had spoken openly before the end. Living in Dubai with her husband Andrea and their daughters, Alexandra begins questioning the habit of keeping grief tucked away as she searches for a way to understand what goodbye means. Experiences she cannot readily explain introduce possibilities she once would have dismissed, then a move to California gives her room to follow those questions. Her memoir follows the distance between losing the people who defined her life and finding a new relationship with death that changes what she believes may exist beyond it.

Alexandra Dionisio’s Learning to Say Goodbye is an exceptional memoir, written with plain-spoken honesty that brings grief close to the reader through gentle humor. Dionisio knows when comedy belongs inside sorrow, so her shoulder critic before the Reiki class becomes a perfect example of that instinct. He appears as a full hipster whose groomed beard sits beneath a beanie as suspenders complete the picture, turning her skepticism into a genuinely funny moment. Dionisio treats the families she meets with extraordinary tenderness, a quality that comes through naturally when Miguel’s family enters the memoir. Two green handprints wait on the paper before Gabriela steps forward to have her hand painted blue-green beside her son’s, giving that small gesture enormous meaning as Dionisio shows what goodbye can hold between people. Learning to Say Goodbye is hopeful memoir writing with real heart, warmly recommended for readers drawn to grief memoirs touched by spirituality.

Learning to Say Goodbye is Alexandra Dionisio's memoir about losing the two most important women in her life and finding an unexpected calling in the aftermath. The book opens with a phone call from Dubai in 2016 that shatters her: her best friend Kathrin has died, a loss that immediately pulls her back to another death still raw in her memory, that of her own mother four years earlier from cancer. Dionisio writes both losses in vivid, physical detail, from sitting at her mother's hospital bedside in Germany to the strange out-of-body shock of receiving devastating news while standing in her own kitchen. What begins as a story of grief and family becomes something larger, as her losses eventually lead her to hospice work and a new understanding of what it means to be with people at the end of life.

Alexandra Dionisio's writing is intensely sensory and emotional, pulling readers directly into moments most memoirs keep at arm's length, like the sound of her mother's death rattle or the German phrase her mother used to mean "pull yourself together." The pacing lingers deliberately on these difficult scenes rather than rushing past them, which makes the book feel honest. Her portraits of Kathrin and her mother are so specific, right down to the Fisherman's Friend lozenges by the door, that both women feel fully alive on the page. The themes of unspoken words and the impossible balancing act between being a daughter and being an equal to a dying parent give the book real emotional depth. I found myself deeply affected by how open Dionisio is about her own guilt and fear. Learning to Say Goodbye is a raw, tender memoir that stays with you.