In an already floundering marriage, Michael and Emily find divorce inevitable when their only child dies. Alone, each deals with grief in their own way. For one, it means years of shame and guilt and personal and private sabotage, all in an effort to understand the death. For the other it means embracing the fragility of life and using it as inspiration for a life of substance, the only way to give death meaning. But even though they face the loss in their own way, and react to it in the only way they know how, they are each as haunted by it as the other, and even after twenty-five years of divorce, remarriage, and successes of all stripe, they still find themselves inexorably linked to one other by their own secrets and suspicious about the one defining event of their lives. While You Were Here. is a story of grief, recovery, and the life-affirming power of the human spirit.