A ghost story that reaffirms living

Sebastopol-based journalist Susan Swartz died by suicide in 2020. Her daughter’s memoir about her mother’s death and its repercussions will be published this week

Samantha Rose, author of Giving Up the Ghost, and her mother Susan Swartz

Samantha Rose is a professional ghostwriter who collaborates with people to put their thoughts, ideas and life experiences into writing. She has partnered on many books that have been featured on The New York Times Bestseller List and elsewhere. Although she calls herself a “ghostwriter,” she never thought that one day she might actually write a book about a ghost. But that’s exactly what she’s done.

The Sonoma County author’s newest book, Giving Up the Ghost is subtitled A Daughter’s Memoir, and the ghost in the title is Rose’s own mother, who died by suicide. The book is about grief and loss, but it is not dark and not without humor and warm moments between mom and daughter, among sisters and with the author’s young son, to whom the book is dedicated.

Sebastopol and western Sonoma County folks may find Rose’s story familiar because her mother, Susan Swartz, was a well-known local journalist, book author and part of a large circle of friends and neighbors in Sebastopol. Her dramatic suicide in early 2020 stunned many people, and the finality of her story has never been told until now.

Giving Up the Ghost is being released this week (Feb. 21), and Samantha Rose will launch a book tour on March 7 at Copperfield’s Books in Petaluma, the town where she is now living. She will be at the Occidental Center for the Arts on May 25, with other local dates expected to be announced soon.)

Samantha grew up in Sebastopol with her two stepsisters, her mother and stepfather Bob Klose. Swartz and Klose were reporters for the Santa Rosa Press Democrat. Klose retired in 2001 and Swartz in 2008.

Klose died on Nov. 21, 2019 after a long fight with cancer, and Swartz took her own life not three months later when she jumped from a tall cliff at Bodega Head into the Pacific Ocean on Feb. 25, 2020. Swartz was 76.

The book begins with the day Samantha and her sisters are told about their mother’s death. The early chapters chronicle the sisters’ shared grief and the many physical chores and “list making” they shared to settle all their mother’s final affairs: canceling magazine subscriptions and social media accounts; sorting through closets, wardrobes and jewelry cases; and, gradually re-connecting with their mother’s many friends — all made doubly difficult because of the death of their father/stepfather just four months prior.

Soon after starting therapy sessions with Rabbi Baruch HaLevi, whom she calls “B,” her mother’s ghost begins to appear in Rose’s dreams. The book moves in and out of Rose’s own past—divorce, relocating back to Sonoma County from Texas and raising her son Derby as a single mother, while Rose’s own mother begins to make more vivid and seemingly physical appearances.

The mother-daughter conversations are the heart of the book and not without some tugs and pulls, small disagreements, literary exchanges, testaments of deep love and something of an ultimate reconciliation — or at least an understanding.

One of the most vivid ghost appearances is when Rose finally gets up the nerve to walk along the Bodega Head where her mother jumped to her death. The mother and daughter sit together on a stone bench looking out over the long, gray horizon of the Pacific Ocean while re-constructing old memories and bargaining with each other about how to go forward.

“I am so sorry I hurt you, that I hurt all of you,” her mother says in the book. “I’m sorry, too,” Rose cried back. “No, no, no,” her mother whispered and pulled her tighter. “You have nothing to be sorry about.”

Asked if the visits by her mother’s ghosts were real, Rose said, “I’ll leave that up to the readers to decide.”

Early in the book, as Swartz’s ghost begins to make appearances, Rose asks her if she should write a book about the suicide, her own complicated feelings and the surrounding conversations between surviving sisters and a young son who had just lost both of his grandparents.

“I asked her if she thought I was writing a book people would really want to read,” Rose said during a recent interview with the Sebastopol Times. “She told me just to trust my own story.” And so Rose engaged publisher Vicki DeArmon, of Sibylline Press, and began work with her agent and an editor.

“So I did write this book for myself,” Rose admitted during the recent interview. “But I also wrote it for her. I felt my mom still had more things to say and for all of us to talk about.” Rose said “B,” her counselor, urged her very early to start organizing her many journals into a possible book. “He said you need to write about this,” she said. After many months of starts and stops, Rose said she committed to making the book her latest full-time job and took six months in 2023 to complete the lengthy memoir.

A family of journalists

Following her divorce in the early 1970s, Susan Swartz moved west to California with her young daughter Rose and soon met and married Bob Klose, a newsroom colleague at the Press Democrat. Klose was a single father with two daughters, similar in age to Rose, and they all re-assembled into a new family and moved first to Santa Rosa then to Sebastopol. The book is full of stories about the warm and sometimes rowdy gatherings in their Sebastopol household, where the doors were almost always left wide open, pending on the weather.

Klose, who died at age 75, was a serious news reporter who took on tough and investigative assignments. An East Bay native, he worked at the Press Democrat for 25 years starting in 1970. Rose always called him “Klose,” his newsroom name, and she loved him as a father, friend and mentor. Along with her two sisters and mother, she spoke at a large public memorial for him in Santa Rosa in 2020, just a block from the original Press Democrat newsroom.

Swartz also was a breaking news reporter and took on many various assignments. But she gravitated to more personal stories and profiles. Her writing talents were best displayed in her longer Sunday pieces about Sonoma County’s traditional and changing lifestyles and new voices. She later became a columnist for the paper and also read on-air commentaries for KRCB public radio.

In the mid-1990s, Klose, Swartz and their daughters took a few years off from the Santa Rosa newspaper while Klose worked for the Stars and Stripes U.S. military newspaper in Germany. Soon after, Swartz published her first book, Juicy Tomatoes, a collection of profiles and observations, subtitled “Plain truths, dumb lies and sisterly advice about life after 50.”

Samantha Rose admits to growing up as a “child of journalism.” She majored in journalism in college and advanced to an Emmy Award-winning career in broadcast writing and producing before launching her own literary company and literary home, Yellow Sky Media. She published her first book, The Package Deal: My (not-so) Glamorous Transition from Single Gal to Instant Mom in 2009. She has since written, co-written or collaborated on 16 other books and publishing projects.

Rose’s step-sisters are Jenni Klose, a lawyer and founder of Generation Housing, a nonprofit housing advocacy organization based in Santa Rosa; and Gretta Klosevitz, a mother of three and an educator. In her acknowledgments in her book, Rose gives special thanks to Rabbi B and to her “surrogate mothers,” Miriam Silver and Sara Peyton, old friends of her mother’s. She also thanks retired journalist Chris Smith and the “old Guard” of the Press Democrat.

During her writing and throughout the book, Rose has many conversations with her two stepsisters, Jenni and Gretta, who both live nearby in Sonoma County. Rose’s most constant companion in the book is her son, Derby, now age 13.

The book ends with a mother-son vacation retreat to Hawaii where they both seek healing. But Rose writes that ultimate soothing from a long bout of grieving and loss is “too convenient.”

“The missing of someone continues,” she writes, “and the missing is hard and long. The fear is not gone either.” And she confesses, “I do not want the scars to heal, not completely.” But as Samantha comes to the end of the final page in her book and gives up the ghost of her mother, she writes: “I choose heartbreak. I choose unknowing. I choose aliveness. I choose life.”

Toward the end of her interview with The Sebastopol Times, Rose said she hopes readers of her book will remember her mother and appreciate all of her complexities and enthusiasm and joy she brought to all her conversations and writings. “I also hope people will have conversations about mental health and maybe have conversations with each other that my mother and I didn’t get to have,” she said.

You can order your copy of Giving Up the Ghost: A Daughter’s Memoir and reserve your spot at Samantha Rose’s March 7 reading at the Petaluma Copperfield’s here.

If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts, confidential assistance is available through the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988.