Mystical, moving, and quietly profound.
Marriage and family therapist MacDonald confronts the death of her father, and the startling spiritual aftermath that reshapes her understanding of grief, identity, and the endurance of love. William “Bill” Basil Pukatch, the emotional center of Hydrangeas from Dad, was “the nicest guy you ever met,” but also something more forceful: a working-class patriarch whose optimism bordered on doctrine. “Never say can’t,” he tells his daughter repeatedly throughout her life. “Put more heart and soul into it.” A retired caterer and Merchant Marine radio officer, he moved through the world with vigor, phoning his children constantly, insisting on loyalty, togetherness, and resilience. “Everything’s great, just great. I’m doing fine. Love ya!” he’d say, arms metaphorically outstretched even as age and illness overtook him. When a final stroke leaves him dying in hospice, MacDonald discovers that decades of clinical experience offer little protection against becoming “only a daughter and a sister, stripped of all else.”
The book’s emotional power comes not from its paranormal premise, but from the precision with which MacDonald renders anticipatory grief and family disorientation. In the hospital room, her father grips her hand while intubated, trying to communicate through frantic finger movements she half-jokingly imagines as Morse code. “Don’t leave me. Don’t give up on me,” she interprets him as saying. The family keeps vigil in shifts, singing, praying, telling stories, and sleeping in chairs beside him. “We knew he was still with us until he took his last breath,” she writes. The scenes avoid sentimentality because MacDonald allows confusion, awkwardness, exhaustion, and unresolved family tensions to coexist with tenderness.
Then comes the event around which the memoir turns. One month after her father’s death, while watching the Oscars alone, her phone vibrates at 11:40 p.m. Across the screen: “Dad.” Attached is a photograph of blue hydrangeas sent from his inactive phone. “What just happened?” she writes, stunned into near paralysis. No one in the family had touched the device. A technician later tells her, “A cell phone cannot spontaneously send a picture text without someone operating the phone.” For MacDonald, the message shatters her previous understanding of mortality and propels her toward shamanism, spiritual inquiry, and a more unapologetically soulful life. The memoir occasionally leans heavily into inspirational language, but its emotional candor keeps it grounded. What lingers is not the mystery of the text itself, but the portrait of a daughter struggling to reconstruct herself after the collapse of the person who anchored her world. Readers who loved The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion and Signs: The Secret Language of the Universe by Laura Lynne Jackson will find much to connect with in this emotionally candid and spiritually inquisitive memoir.
A searching grief memoir that treats death not as closure, but as an unsettling continuation.
***
Balboa Press
Pub date November 23, 2025
ISBN 979-8765261705
Price $38.12 (USD) Hardcover, $16.99 Paperback, $3.99 Kindle edition
