A memoir of devastating honesty, warmth, and unexpected grace about raising children while learning how to live with what love leaves behind.
On a family holiday meant to create lasting memories, everything changes in an instant.
When a sudden medical crisis strikes in New York, Paul Folino-Gallo finds himself in a hospital room facing the unimaginable. His sons Giorgio, eight, and Valentino, six, still believe their mother will be coming home.
In the space between one breath and the next, Paul realises he will have to tell them she isn’t.
In the days and months that follow, he must learn how to raise two boys in a world permanently altered by absence.
Life, however, continues in small and sometimes surprising ways. School lunches are packed, soccer games are played, and burnt dinners are immortalised in six-year-old Valentino’s ‘Sad Dad’ drawings. Eight-year-old Giorgio begins asking the kinds of questions children are never meant to ask … where does love go when someone dies?
Family traditions continue even when the heart of the family is gone. Two boys grieve in different ways, and a father learns to honour both. Slowly, they discover that grief does not move in a straight line. It changes shape, making space for joy and sorrow to exist in the same breath.
Through these months runs a quieter reflection on the men who came before him, and the ways families learn, generation by generation, to carry grief.
Remembering Elysha offers no false comfort and no easy answers. This is grief told truthfully — the longing, the dark humour, the absurd moments, and the quiet reality that life continues alongside loss. A reminder that the bonds of family, forged in both joy and sorrow, can hold us together even when everything else changes.
‘We carry you with us, not as a burden but as the greatest privilege.’
About the Author
Paul Folino Gallo is a Sydney-based barrister, father of two, and memoirist writing about love, loss, and fatherhood. At forty-one, he was widowed after the sudden death of his wife, Elysha, an experience that reshaped his understanding of grief, masculinity, and what it means to be the parent who stayed.
His debut memoir, Remembering Elysha, explores early widowhood from a father’s perspective while tracing the generational patterns that shape how men grieve. Reflecting on his own family history, including his father’s childhood after the violent loss of his own father at nine, Paul considers what we inherit emotionally and what we choose to change.
Moving between the quiet logistics of survival, the ache of anniversaries, and the sacred ordinariness of school lunches and bedtime rituals, his writing explores life in the shadow of absence. It is as much about breaking silence as it is about bearing loss.
In the courtroom, Paul is an experienced advocate trained to bring precision to complex human stories. In his writing, he brings that same discipline to the emotional landscape of grief, giving language to what many feel but struggle to express. He writes for those who were never shown how to grieve, and for the children watching them learn.
Author lives in Sydney, NSW.
