Yvonne Caputo – författare

Award-Winning Finalist, 2020 Best Book Awards

(American Book Fest, Health: Aging/50+)

Written with vivid detail, this encouraging, life-giving book is a tale of a World War II Veteran father and his daughter, who found the relationship with him she''d always longed for.

Do you have a family member who served in the military, who perhaps saw war, and wondered what their experience was really like? Do you suspect there are past traumas that might be affecting their ability to open up? Do you wish you could feel closer and more connected to your mom, dad, or other family members? If yes, Flying with Dad will pull you into a real-life story that shows you how.

At age ten, author Yvonne Caputo vied for her dad''s attention. At twenty, they fought about race. At sixty, she struggled to talk with him about what mattered.

In Flying With Dad, Caputo charts her journey to her father through the re-telling of why he went from repairing planes to being a B-24 navigator in WWII, how heavy German flak led to post-war nightmares, and why he suffered years of guilt after one particular bombing run over Unterschlauersbach, Germany.

Over the years, Yvonne would ask her father questions about this past. She''d listen, pay attention, and found that he was paying attention to her as well. As she learned to meet him where he was, instead of where she wanted him to be, the result was an intimacy, a deep abiding respect, and a no-regrets final goodbye.

Flying with Dad is a heart-wrenching and heart-warming story of a daughter striving to understand her father and him opening up about the experiences that shapes so many soldiers and can get in the way of the rich relationships they and their children deserve.

How do we want others to remember us after we''re gone?

How do we want to be treated in our final days?

Yvonne Caputo is no stranger to death. Before she was thirty, she could list seventeen family members and friends who had passed away. Among them were her uncle Claude and his son Jimmy, both dead by suicide; her cousin Alan, murdered in Central Park; and her brother Mark, killed in a car accident. Each of these deaths left her with questions, the most important of which was: Why don''t we talk about the end of life before the end of life? 

Yvonne Caputo''s first book, Flying with Dad, was about her father''s experiences in World War II. But this wasn''t what readers focused their questions on. Instead, they asked her about how she and her dad talked about how he envisioned his end-of-life experiences, how she walked him through his Five Wishes document and how, when the day came, she stopped the paramedics from reviving him. 

In Dying with Dad, Yvonne shares the joy she felt when her father died on his terms. And the reason she knew what those terms were was because they had a heart-to-heart conversation about it before it was too late. 

Working in a retirement facility, Yvonne saw what happens when we wait until when Dad is dying or when Mom is dying to talk about what the dying desire. While a living will and trust take care of the legalities involved in how we want to live our final days and how we want to die, an end-of-life conversation should go beyond medical treatment and estate planning. We need to talk about the emotional and the spiritual too.