Our Long Goodbye: A Daughter, a Father, a Best Friend, and the Journey Through Alzheimer's

About This Audiobook

In this deeply emotional memoir, a grieving daughter bonds with her father's best friend of eighty years—and reconnects with her father—through the stories her unlikely new friend shares with her. .... From the moment Teri Roche Drobnick's father is diagnosed with Alzheimer's, she feels like he's slipping away. As she grapples with an uncertain future and the steady erosion of his memory, Teri leans on Uncle Bob—her dad's best friend of eighty years. As Teri navigates the emotional limbo of caring for a parent with dementia, she and Uncle Bob, united by mutual grief, form a deeper bond from the stories he shares of his lifelong friendship with her father. Beginning with their boyhood during World War II, Uncle Bob recounts first dates, college at UC Berkeley, marriages, building a business, raising children, surviving loss. In the present, Teri confronts the anger, loneliness, and role reversal that accompany memory decline—but through tales of the past, she finds a way to reconnect with her father. With a narrative braided between past and present, Our Long Goodbye is a poignant love letter from a daughter to her father that explores anticipatory grief, enduring friendship, and the profound power of shared memory.

About the Author

Teri Roche Drobnick worked in the medical field as a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and now writes full time. Since losing her father to Alzheimer's, she has worked as a volunteer community educator for the Alzheimer's Association. She is the author of a children's book, Moving Day, which Publishers Weekly called "charming, entertaining, and full of heart." When Teri's not writing, she can be found hiking or rowing on the Petaluma River. Raised in Lafayette, CA, she has two grown daughters and currently resides in Petaluma, CA, with her husband and her best friend, Hobie, a Goldendoodle.

Reviews

A licensed clinical social worker, Alzheimer's Association volunteer educator, and author of the children's book Moving Day (2025), Drobnick offers what appears to be a simple story of her father's slow decline from Alzheimer's, but much more is to be found under that patina. Drobnick's book also chronicles the intertwined lives of her father and his best friend, who shared the name Robert. She takes readers from their boyhood friendship to their strengthening bond as brothers in the Sigma Nu fraternity (with an anecdote of their efforts to integrate the national fraternity), and then how their brother-like closeness continued as each got married, became fathers, and raised loving families. Throughout, Drobnick presents a certain idealized image of their youths, as well as her own, which then makes what's to come all-the-more affecting. Yet she also emphasizes how the friendship grew over the years into an unbreakable bond. To Drobnick's credit, this memoir is about much more than Alzheimer's. The author also explores how we choose to remember our loved ones beyond their decline and death. She began work on the book while her father was still alive, guessing correctly that she had a compelling story to tell. She also highlights the public service aspect of writing this book, which includes a plug for the Alzheimer's Association in the afterword. Of course, writing family stories for public consumption is not a simple task, and this book illustrates the hard choices the author had to make. For example, Drobnick only briefly mentions her father's civic involvement, including serving as mayor of his hometown, among other seemingly unsung accomplishments. But overall, this is a thoughtful and universal meditation on the life and death of a loved one.

A reminder of the irrepressible humanity that often lies behind individual Alzheimer's stories.

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