Description

Ava begins with a phone call in the middle of the night and doesn’t look away from anything that follows.

When Ava Kali Simerl died by suicide in December 2024 at nineteen years old, she was not, by any observable measure, in crisis. She had returned recently from three months traveling the country with her boyfriend. She had money, plans, relationships that were working, and a future she was actively building toward. Her last conversation with her father, the day before, was full of jokes. There was no indication of what was coming. That gap — between what was visible and what happened — is one of the things this book sits with rather than explaining away.

The book moves through the hospital, the days on the ICU waiting for the organ donation process to complete, the reconstruction of what occurred the night of December 2nd, and then into something rarer: 2.5 years of text exchanges between a father and his daughter, beginning when she was sixteen. What those exchanges reveal is a relationship — specific, funny, warm, and real — that exists now only in this record. Reading them is the closest thing available to knowing her.

Alongside the personal account, the book engages seriously with the questions that loss of this kind forces: what does it mean for a consciousness to end, what is existence for, and whether the people we lose are actually gone. These aren’t treated as consolations or abstractions. They’re examined through the same framework the author applies to everything — rigorously, without sentiment substituting for reasoning — and they lead somewhere specific.

Ava is not a grief memoir in the conventional sense. It is a father’s honest account of losing his daughter, and an examination of what that loss means in the context of what existence actually is.