Tracey April Percival

“My sister, Tracey April Percival, published The Last Goodbye: A Daughter’s Soul-Searching Journey on Her Last Visit with Her Dying Mother in 2022.

Sadly, Tracey passed away on March 15, 2025, following a courageous battle with cancer. One of the legacies she leaves behind is this deeply personal memoir, written in the hope that others might find comfort, understanding, and healing through her experience. While her life was cut far too short, her words continue to offer insight into love, loss, caregiving, forgiveness, and the complex relationships that shape us.

On July 31, 2017, Tracey was present at the death of our mother. Although our mother’s death was expected, it still came with profound emotional weight. In addition to living with frontal lobe dementia for several years, she had developed a form of leukemia in the final months of her life.

Tracey and our mother loved one another, but theirs was a complicated relationship marked by unmet expectations, mutual stubbornness, and affection that often went unspoken. As a result, they remained emotionally distant for much of their adult lives—a dynamic that is perhaps more common in parent-child relationships than many of us would like to admit.

Following our mother’s death, Tracey carried a grief that lingered for years. When the COVID-19 pandemic brought life to a standstill, she found herself reflecting deeply on her relationship with our mother and on what it had meant to be present during her final days. Those reflections eventually became The Last Goodbye.

The book is a raw and deeply personal account of one family’s end-of-life journey. More importantly, it explores universal themes of caregiving, regret, forgiveness, acceptance, and the search for peace when time is running short. It asks difficult questions that many people face when a loved one is dying: What happens when there is no opportunity for a final conversation? How do we find healing when some questions remain unanswered? And how do we move forward carrying both love and loss?

As I read Tracey’s book, I was reminded that there are times in life when we must stop waiting for the other person to take the first step toward healing a fractured relationship. Sometimes circumstances make that impossible. By the end of her life, our mother was no longer cognitively capable of revisiting old hurts or answering the questions that had troubled Tracey for many years.

Although Tracey wrote this book to better understand her relationship with our mother and to process her own grief, the lessons she discovered extend far beyond our family. Her willingness to confront pain, accept what could not be changed, and meet our mother’s final days with dignity and compassion offers an example of the healing that can occur when we choose understanding over resentment and presence over regret.

I hope her story will encourage others who are facing their own end-of-life journey—or the impending loss of someone they love—to seek peace, understanding, and reconciliation wherever possible, especially when time is short and the opportunity may soon be gone.

If you choose to read The Last Goodbye, Tracey’s family would be grateful if you would consider leaving a review on Amazon. Knowing that her words continued to help others brought Tracey tremendous comfort during her lifetime, and it remains a source of comfort to her husband and sons today. More than anything, Tracey hoped that by sharing her story, others might find understanding, healing, and hope within their own lives. It is a legacy that continues each time a reader finds comfort, insight, or peace in the pages of The Last Goodbye.”

Tammy La Rue, Tracey’s sister