The Road to Yesterday: A Memoir

Reading The Road to Yesterday felt like both an act of witness and a deeply personal reckoning. Maryellen Donovan’s memoir is not only a testament to unimaginable loss but also to the endurance of love, community, and the complicated journey of healing. The book opens with the idyllic everyday moments of family life: dropping off her son at school, juggling renovations, savoring a rekindled romance with her husband, Steve. These early scenes pulse with normalcy, even joy, which makes the devastation of September 11, 2001, when Steve was killed while working at Cantor Fitzgerald in the North Tower, all the more shattering.

What struck me most was the way Donovan balances the intimacy of her story with the broader cultural trauma of 9/11. Her grief is both uniquely her own and part of a collective wound. Themes of motherhood run powerfully through the memoir, as she had to hold herself together to shield her six-year-old son, Brett, from the worst of the horror while cradling her infant, Colton, against her chest. The book lays bare how motherhood can be both a burden and a lifeline in grief: the need to parent pushes her to rise each morning, even when despair urges her back into bed.

Another central theme is community. Donovan’s home quickly filled with neighbors, siblings, friends, and fellow widows who became her lifeboats. Some moments, such as the casserole-filled refrigerator, her son taping a “Welcome Home Daddy” sign to their front door, and the candlelight vigil in her yard, speak to how grief weaves people together in rituals of comfort and remembrance. Yet, she is unflinchingly honest about how loss can also fray relationships, particularly when grief makes empathy hard to summon, even with those she loves.

Donovan recounts the last phone call with Steve, his unusual tenderness, and how those words became frozen in amber, a reminder of love but also of its sudden ending. Memory becomes a double-edged sword: a source of solace and of unbearable pain. She describes the raw, almost physical ache of Steve’s absence in everyday objects: his pressed suits still in plastic, his untouched coffee machine, his father’s song sung at their wedding and remembered at his funeral.

What makes The Road to Yesterday so affecting is its refusal to resolve neatly. Donovan doesn’t offer platitudes about resilience. Instead, she invites readers into the complexity: the anger at insensitive comments, the envy at women who still had their husbands, the moments when grief felt like quicksand. Yet, there are glimmers of hope: new friendships with other widows, small acts of kindness, and her eventual belief that she could carry both love and loss forward into the future.

For me, this book reminded me that while tragedy can alter the shape of a family forever, it also deepens our appreciation for love in all its fragile, fleeting forms. Donovan shows us that yesterday is never fully gone; it continues to live in memory, in children, in community, and in the enduring imprint of those we lose.