Faced with a shattering loss, a young widow searches for answers, acceptance, and family resilience.
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After taking her sons on a hike with the family dog one beautiful fall afternoon, Charlotte returned home to find a policewoman, a policeman, and a priest in her driveway—there to deliver the news of her husband’s suicide. Charlotte knew her husband had been stressed about work, but she had no idea he was suicidal. She thought he had stayed home to take a nap.
As a young widow, Charlotte cried, cursed, meditated, medicated, downward-dogged, and ran as a way to make sense of her husband’s suicide. As the mother of two bereft sons, she summoned her inner strength and clarity in order to provide steady guidance for them to navigate their own ways through the ensuing months and years. Her story offers powerful lessons and practical ways in which suicide survivors can frame a stunning tragedy and move forward to live lives of joy and purpose.
ADVANCE PRAISE
“Sushi Tuesdays is an achingly beautiful memoir that I want to put in the hands of every person I know who has experienced grief. Actually, I want everyone who is human to read this marvel of a love story. Charlotte Maya unflinchingly brings light and hope to things most people are afraid to talk about. We need her voice. This book will stay with you long after the last page. ”
“Sushi Tuesdays is a story of hope and healing in the face of unspeakable sadness. With her exquisite writing, unflinching candor and at times wry humor, Charlotte Maya shares her family’s struggle with the abject sorrow of her husband’s suicide and the winding path to recovery. It’s a beautiful and poignant reminder that even in life’s darkest times, daylight is within reach. ”
“Sushi Tuesdays, a stunningly honest and beautifully written memoir by Charlotte Maya, does the impossible: answers the question of how you survive after a loved one dies by suicide. One ordinary October Saturday, the author’s husband of fifteen years jumped off a building while she and her young sons were at a soccer game, leaving her shocked, furious and widowed. In an instant. Her account of the minutes, hours, days, months and years after the suicide is unflinching, opening a window into the most intimate stages of grief that most of us would be too timid to ask about. There are lessons here for all of us, for those who have wondered about what it must be like to absorb that kind of loss and for those of us who have experienced suicide in our own lives. As we learn from Maya, moving forward involves anger, love, patience, therapy, friends, running, faith, and yes, sushi on Tuesdays. ”
“Why?” asks Charlotte Maya in this eloquent and heart wrenching memoir of the aftermath of her 41 year old husband’s suicide. Left with two young sons to raise she also asks “What now?” As she navigates the days, weeks, months and years afterward, the why is never fully answered but she moves forward through grief, therapy, dealing with extended family and caring for her boys to discover an unexpected what now. Written with grace, grit and dark humor, Maya’s journey through her own grief offers comfort to anyone whose partner has died. To those who are surviving parents of young children it offers even more – the kids can get through it too. This is a story ultimately of love, hope and gratitude. ”
“A heartbreakingly beautiful story of loss and resurrection of both family and faith, shared with generosity of spirit and heart, and the assurance that the deepest wounds in life can, with work, be healed by love. ”
“Gripping, beautiful and inspiring. An absolutely stunning memoir from the first page to the last!!”
“Everyone knows someone who has taken their own life. . .and everyone knows someone who is thinking about it – whether we know it or not. But we don’t talk about it. Ever. And that silence isolates. That silence kills. I wish I had read Sushi Tuesdays 20 years ago when I had to preside at the funeral of a college student who had taken his life. I wish I had read it three years ago when a parishioner of mine jumped off a bridge leaving his wife and young child behind. I wish I had read it and I wish I had had it to give to those who were going through this nightmare because it is simply the best, most honest memoir of suicide I can possibly imagine. From the very first chapter, Charlotte Maya gently invites us into the brutality of someone you love taking their own life. Sushi Tuesdays is vulnerable without being self-indulgent. It is raw without being grisly. She masterfully captures the complexity of the emotions and experiences she held and still holds in tension, resisting the temptation to tie it up in a bow. Her pain and rage is as real as her hope and love. This book changed me … and I am deeply grateful for it and for her. Sushi Tuesdays should be required reading in every seminary. . .and really for every person. Because everyone knows someone who has taken their own life. Everyone knows someone who is closer to it than we think. ”
“Sushi Tuesdays captures the beautiful ache of being human. If you’re in the depths of loss, wondering how you will open your heart again, this book is for you. Charlotte Maya is a stunning writer who shows us how to hold space for grief with unflinching truth and love. ”
“In Sushi Tuesdays, Charlotte Maya offers us a glimpse into her life and the lives of her young sons in the devastating aftermath of her husband’s suicide. With unflinching honesty and unexpected humor, Maya shares her family’s journey from overwhelming grief to surprising new beginnings. It’s not a spoiler to say love wins.”