These events, foretold, are of forty years ago. They were a surreal blur then and remain so. A fever dream that was tragically real. Even with the clarity of time, there is only distance. And the need to understand. I suppose it is a long overdue, long goodbye.

Grief is a great theme of our times and this is a memoir of grief in action.

On the tempest-tossed afternoon of 9 July 1982, Pan Am flight 759 crashed into a suburb of New Orleans shortly after takeoff. Eight people on the ground and all 145 passengers died, among them Peter’s parents, Margaret and Brian Goers, aged 50 and 52. Peter, busy with his promising career as a director, had not said goodbye.

Peter left for the US the next day, summoned to identify the bodies. These are his impressions of a strange and tragic journey full of potent memory, loss, poignant candour, wisdom and family redemption.

In this memoir of grief, South Australia’s own Peter Goers, a self-described ‘reformed social irritant’ explores the aftermath of his parents’ deaths, when, in 1982, both died suddenly in a plane crash.