A call one morning, a sudden shift of plans, of being, of thinking. A mother learns that her only daughter has died, propelling her physical journey across the country to cope with the immediacy of death, and compelling her to find ways to live around that loss in the year that follows In presenting vignettes from their mutual, forty-year past, as well as her day-to-day efforts to assuage her grief, the narrator of Surviving Susan invites the readers into a candid examination of her own parenting. Told with honesty and directness, this memoir about surviving a death brings its focus characters to vivid life.