Tomorrow Comes by Donna Mebane

The unthinkable happened to Donna Mebane: her 19 year-old daughter Emma died suddenly in her sleep. She wasn’t sick; she simply went to bed one night and never woke up.

It’s every parent’s worst nightmare come true. Emma Mebane left a hole in the lives of the people who knew her best. They couldn’t wrap their heads around the idea that a perfectly healthy 19 year-old could die without warning.

Donna Mebane channeled her grief into Tomorrow Comes, a novel that skirts the lines of fact and fiction. For half of the novel, she writes about the events that really happened: Emma’s trip to visit her in Europe the week before her death, her memorial service and the hundreds of messages posted to her Facebook wall. Then she dives into what she wishes had happened, namely, that her daughter is in heaven watching over her family.

Where the novel falls short is in Mebane’s switchover to fiction.

The factual accounts in the novel remain Donna Mebane’s greatest strength as a writer. The real stories about her daughter have a brutal honesty in the way she tells them. Where the novel falls short is in Mebane’s switchover to fiction.

Mebane says she was inspired by The Lovely Bones, a fictional novel about a murdered teenager who tries to give her family clues from heaven to solve her murder. The difference between these two novels is that the character in The Lovely Bones is pure fiction, while Emma Mebane is real.

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It’s hard for a reader to both accept the tragedy of Emma’s actual death, and suspend reality long enough to follow her new life in heaven. If Emma had been a purely fictional character, it would be easy to believe she is in heaven trying to learn new rules. Since she is a real person, the fictional accounts of her time in heaven are hard for readers to believe. They’re left to sort out what’s real and what isn’t, rather than being transported to another world by a fictional character.

It’s like a first-time cook trying to bake the perfect souffle on her first attempt.

Tomorrow Comes is Donna Mebane’s first novel, and it’s an ambitious one. Even writers with dozens of books to their names would never attempt to combine fact with fiction. It’s like a first-time cook trying to bake the perfect souffle on her first attempt.

While I respect her ambition and honesty in her writing, Tomorrow Comes feels more like a peek into someone’s diary than a novel. Donna Mebane is working through her emotions on the page, trying to make sense of her daughter’s death. When she goes into detail about her family dynamics, I get the overwhelming sense that I’m an outsider reading something I should not be reading.

Days later, I still cannot wrap my head around one paragraph in Tomorrow Comes, where Donna is imagining speaking to her daughter, “I said no, no autopsy, and I said it was because I couldn’t bear to have them cut you up, and surely that was part of it. But was part of it also that, if somehow your most-awesome-trip-ever had anything at all to do with your dying, I would have to just curl up and die too?”

What makes this revelation so confusing is that it would be nearly impossible to successfully refuse an autopsy in Emma Mebane’s home state of Illinois, regardless of the family’s wishes. The law usually requires autopsies in cases where a perfectly healthy person died outside of a hospital. Emma Mebane certainly fits this description.

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Having an autopsy is an essential step for closure in many people’s minds. When a loved one dies suddenly, surviving family members almost always want to know why. It’s possible that the real Emma Mebane had an autopsy performed, but that her mother chose to omit the results from the story. It’s also possible that Donna Mebane truly never wanted to know the results, and so she never did.

The autopsy is an important unanswered question. The novel makes a case that the “why” of Emma Mebane’s death is not as important as the life that slowly hobbles on and heals afterward. It’s true that the reason Emma Mebane died no longer matters. But this young woman’s unanswered death overwhelms the subtle emotions in the book. I simply could not accept that a healthy, vivacious 19 year-old suddenly dropped dead of no cause long enough to fully enjoy her fictional experiences in heaven.

To write a work of fiction, an author needs to channel real-life emotions while being objective to the characters in the story.

To write a work of fiction, an author needs to channel real-life emotions while being objective to the characters in the story. Asking this of Tomorrow Comes is simply not possible. Donna Mebane is too close to the story, and why wouldn’t she be? We’re not talking about a character she created in her imagination. We’re talking about her daughter.

In this sense, Tomorrow Comes stands as a window into the thoughts, worries and sadness of people who experienced a terrible loss. Its connection to reality drives the story into a meaning that’s more powerful than its fictional aspects. On the surface, Tomorrow Comes is about a young woman who dies and tries to help her family recover as she navigates heaven. Deeper than this, it’s a book about how a mother can learn to cope when the world seems to have collapsed around her.