About the Book

The book, and what it carries.

A memoir of grief, fatherhood, and the life that continues – written in the year after Elysha’s sudden death, by the husband and father left to make sense of it.

Cover of Remembering Elysha
Remembering Elysha
Paul Folino Gallo
Big Sky Publishing, 2026
ISBN 978-1-923514-88-1
Cover design: Think Productions

A husband’s record of love, loss, and what comes next.

On 5 January 2024, Elysha Folino Gallo died suddenly of influenza in a New York hospital. She was 38. Her husband Paul was 42. Their sons, Giorgio and Valentino, were eight and six. A family flew home to Sydney without her.

What followed was a year. Remembering Elysha is the record of it – written from inside the wreckage and out the other side. It is a love story, an account of a marriage and the partnership that built it. It is the chronicle of a hospital, a long flight, and a funeral. It is the quiet logistics of survival: school lunches packed wrong, library books forgotten, Halloween costumes that did not work. It is a father learning to be the parent who stayed.

Paul writes as a Sydney-based barrister trained to bring precision to complex human stories. He brings that same discipline here – to the courtroom and the kitchen, to anniversaries and ordinary Tuesdays, to the inherited patterns of how men in his family have grieved across generations, and to what he hopes his sons will inherit instead.

From the Author’s Note

This is a book about my wife, Elysha, who died suddenly of influenza in a New York hospital on 5 January 2024. She was thirty-eight. Our sons, Giorgio and Valentino, were eight and six.

What I have written is what I remember and what I understand. I have tried to be accurate. I have tried not to soften what was not soft.

This is my version of a story that belongs to many people. It is not the only version. It is the one I was able to write.

The memoir is honest about depression, about the failures of language, about the things grief breaks and the things it does not. It moves from the meeting and the marriage, through the hospital and the journey home, into the first year of grief and a closing correspondence written to Elysha after her death.

It is, finally, a book about presence – about the particular, durable form love takes when the person you loved is no longer there to receive it. The marriage continues, in the only form still available to it. A story ends. A love goes on speaking.