Review of “Don’t Be Sad When I’m Gone”: A Memoir of Loss and Healing in Buenos Aires

Abstract

Don’t Be Sad When I’m Gone is, at once, a lamentation and an affirmation: an affirmation of life and the relationships that nurture it. In this touching memoir, Beatriz Dujovne invites the reader on an extraordinary journey of witnessing—witnessing her grief over the death of her deeply loved husband, Carlos, and then witnessing the reparative experience she both discovers and creates. She takes us back in time to the Argentina of her past and forward to the present, which includes her psychoanalysis with Dr. Novelli. Beatriz is a psychologist in private practice in Buenos Aires and Portland Oregon; she and her husband Carlos met in Buenos Aires while engaged in graduate studies, she in psychology and Carlos in medicine. They emigrated to the United States and lived first in Chicago where Carlos did his post medical training at Mt. Sinai Hospital. Beatriz completed her Ph.D. at the University of Missouri. Carlos’s diagnosis and death from cancer years later was devastating for Beatriz and her memoir is an account of her profound mourning, her analysis with Dr. Novelli and her struggle toward repair.