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A darkly humorous yet uplifting novel about a grieving mother who starts working at a funeral home and discovers that the best way to honor the dead is to live …

All Cleo Dang has ever wanted is to be a mother. The day she discovers she’s pregnant is the happiest of her life, especially when she learns that her best friend, Paloma, is also expecting. It’s a wonderful surprise, and together, they enjoy their pregnancies. But when they both go to the hospital in labor, something goes very, very wrong. Paloma comes home with a baby. Cleo does not.

Ravaged by grief, Cleo must now navigate life after losing her baby. She alienates herself from the world, particularly her best friend, who is living the life she so desperately wanted. Forced to take leave from her demanding job as an actuary, Cleo manages to find work at a funeral home, where she meets a revolving cast of bereaved locals and discovers the power of confronting grief.

Darkly humorous yet uplifting, Cleo Dang Would Rather Be Dead follows a grieving mother who starts working at a funeral home and discovers that the best way to honor the dead is to live.

CW/TW – loss of full term infant, suicidal ideation, severe depression, marriage tension

Dear Ms. Nguyen,

I read the book title then I read the blurb and I’m still not exactly sure what led me to request this book. I’ve never been pregnant. I’ve never suffered this kind of loss. But something urged me to read this book. It’s not an easy read but it shouldn’t be. Readers, if you’ve made it past the tags, the blurb, and the CW/TW then you probably have an idea of whether or not reading this book is a good choice for you.

As the story begins, Cleo Dang and her husband Ethan are attending the funeral of their daughter Daisy. Cleo tells the story in first person to Daisy about how numb Cleo is at the funeral home, how unready to deal with a receiving line, how dry-eyed she remains even as her own mother collapses twice and Ethan is quietly sobbing at Cleo’s side. Cleo talks about how she hates flowers now, how hard it is to get out of bed yet how much she needs to do something to take her mind off her loss yet when she attempts to go back to work, things … don’t go well.

When Cleo and Ethan go to pick up Daisy’s cremains, Cleo reads an ad for an assistant at the funeral home, and still needing a reason to get out of bed and take a shower, she applies. There’s a Reason why the owner urges Cleo to apply and why he doesn’t talk much about his private life. Cleo delves into work but her own life is a mess of grief, pain, anger at what she’s lost and jealousy at what her best friend has. Can Cleo come to terms with what has happened, what will never change, and what her future holds?

This is not an easy book. By the end I felt as if I’d gone through Cleo’s grief, her rage, her emptiness. There are times when I wanted to join her friends, husband, and family in getting her into therapy. It’s not until the end of the book when Cleo divulges a concrete cultural reason why she’s avoided therapy to go along with her feeling that “this is my pain and I’ll experience it how I want to.” And that is the main thing. There is a thread going through everyone’s pain but their way of dealing with it is their own. No one is wrong, no way is better or worse. The hell is similar and yet unique.

Cleo suffers through awkward conversations, the cliche texts her mother sends her, overhearing two work colleagues questioning why Cleo never cried at the funeral, seeing her best friend and knowing that Paloma has a child at home and is experiencing everything Cleo longs for.

At times Cleo is abrasive and says some truly horrible things from the depths of her pain. She says if a crane was falling off a building, she wouldn’t rush to get out of the way. She begs her doctor (who, whoa, what a piece of …) for sleep aids and pills to decrease her breast milk. She does some highly questionable things that when they come out stun and horrify her husband and her friend. Yep, not easy to read.

I appreciated the unvarnished view of Cleo and what she goes through. Bravo that Ethan, though he’s mainly a step back as this is a first person narrative, has his moments as well as his struggles with his grief. One thing to mention is

By the end of the story, Cleo has managed to keep her head above water but realizes that she will never be the person she was, her grief will never totally leave her but that there is light at the end of the tunnel. B

~Jayne

Definitely read the Author’s Note at the end of the book. It explains why the book is so heart wrenchingly real.

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