Wendy MacNaughton: How to Say Goodbye

Reading Wendy MacNaughton’s How to Say Goodbye brought back the vivid memory of my mother’s last moment on earth.

After they pulled the plugs on her, we had less than a minute to say goodbye. I spoke to her in Vietnamese, “Mẹ, please let yourself go. I love you and you will always be in my heart. Goodbye for now.” A tear rolled down her eye. She stopped breathing. My mother left this world.

This illustrated little book is an honest, heartfelt, and helpful guide on how to say goodbye to someone you love. It’s a gift to see the journey to death through MacNaughton’s visuals and observations. “It’s very courageous to sit with someone while they’re dying.” She wrote, “But you can’t fix this. You’re not in charge. The person dying is in charge.”

Saying goodbye is not easy, but “sometimes it’s just sitting and being there.”