Reviewed by Katherine Itacy
Posted on: December 23, 2025
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The author, Samantha “Sam” Rose, has been ghostwriting for other people for years, and it’s clear from the beginning of her memoir that she’s a talented writer. The book, although incredibly heavy in its subject matter, is an easy, moving read.
Sadly, Sam went through a lot between 2019 and 2020: In mid-2019, Sam and her husband began dissolving their fifteen-year marriage. In December 2019, after battling metastatic lung cancer for the past year, Sam’s stepfather passed away. In early February 2020, Sam moved into a new, smaller home and was processing having to share custody of her eight-year-old son with her former husband. Two weeks later, on February 25, 2020, her mother died by suicide, and less than a month after that, the COVID-19 lockdown began.
While her mother, Susan, had been depressed as she took care of her ailing husband and then, of course, after he died, Sam had no idea that her mother had plans to end her life. The day Susan jumped to her death into the Pacific Ocean, she’d spoken with Sam just hours before, and the two had made plans to get together in a few days.
Without specifically listing and checking off each of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s stages of grief, Giving Up the Ghost details Sam’s experiences with denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and the eventual acceptance of her mother’s suicide. Her initial reaction was that their family “didn’t do this” (i.e., commit suicide), as if a certain type of family is immune to it and another is more prone to do it. She describes her guilt at not being able to anticipate and prevent her mother’s death, especially since the two had such a close relationship. You can feel Sam’s pain and confusion, as well as her need for answers. Susan was the first person Sam would call when something good or bad happened in her adult life, and now that she needed her the most, Susan was gone. Sam realized she had to figure out who she was with her mother no longer (physically) in her life.
Sam takes you through her grief journey over the first few years after Susan’s death and includes how her two sisters and her eight-year-old son process the sudden loss. Heartbreakingly, they’d just suffered the loss of Susan’s husband of nearly forty years, Bob Klose. Called Klose by his friends and family, he was an investigative journalist and had stayed in great shape throughout most of his life. Unfortunately, he was diagnosed a year prior to his death with metastatic lung cancer, and that year of Klose’s treatments and sickness took a heavy emotional toll on Susan.
Sam describes her work with a grief counselor to process her mother’s fatal decision. He encourages her to feel her feelings of anger toward her mom for leaving her and the family behind, for dying in such a public and dramatic way, and for giving up on life. Those were her honest feelings, and she needed to get them out.
Throughout the book, you see how Sam realizes that her mother was a people pleaser in life and typically presented a positive outward appearance to others. Sam herself had mimicked that growing up and now wanted to work on changing that about herself. She didn’t want to likewise teach her son to suppress his real feelings to appease other people. And after ghostwriting for others over the past fifteen years, she was ready to focus on her own story and stop keeping her voice quiet in order to promote someone else’s.
Through her work with her counselor, by reading her mother’s journals, and by having imagined or dreamt conversations with her mother, Sam is able to find acceptance of her mother’s death and better understands that Susan, in the months leading up to her suicide, felt she couldn’t find a way forward in life.
Sam dreamt Susan asked her to stop remembering her in her last (worst) year of her life, and to start remembering the totality of her life and all they had together and all she was, versus all they’d lost when she died.
Sam does a wonderful job highlighting and celebrating her mother’s contributions in life. Susan Swartz was a local columnist in Sonoma County, CA, writing for the Press Democrat for forty-five years, and was an outspoken feminist. In her early 50s, she wrote a series of books about living a full life, and she seemed to live up to her word on that up until the last year or so of her life, when she seemed to be struggling with severe depression.
I found the book to be an honest, vulnerable, touching piece of writing about a grieving daughter and the ripple effects that suicide can have upon so many people in the deceased’s life. I would highly recommend it, regardless of whether you’ve been personally impacted by suicide or suicidal attempts in some way. We’ve all experienced loss and grief, and in my opinion, Giving Up the Ghost is a beautiful exploration of how to move through the grieving process and how to live a fuller, more authentic life.
