Very Grateful: The Story of My Hundred-Year-Old Mother and Me

VERY GRATEFUL details the last two years of the life of Janet Eberman and her close relationship with her daughter, author Bobbi Fisher. It begins with Janet’s last words to Bobbi, just thirteen days before she died, at age one hundred and one. The book documents Bobbi’s examination of her life and her relationship with her mother during 2009-2011, as both of them hold on and let go. Bobbi’s journal entries and emailed letters to her siblings and her mother, plus interpolated reflections and flashbacks, describe Janet’s slow decline as Bobbi’s life increasingly revolves around caring for her mother and observing and learning from her mother’s faith in God. In the journal excerpts Bobbi also explores the meaning of her own life, her quest for solitude at a cottage she rents by the sea in the winter, her travels to Scotland and Italy, her deepening faith, and the realization of her own aging as she circles what it means to be seventy years old. This loving, personal memoir ends after Janet’s death, as Bobbi reflects on what she has learned from her mother’s last two years and her hopes for the future as she moves on without the mother she has cherished so deeply.