Closing Ceremonies and Dying Times (Guernica Editions, 2026; 300 pp), the latest title from Darlene Madott, is not one book but two. Closing Ceremonies is a collection of interconnected stories that hinge on Francesca Malotti getting a second chance at love when she meets Scott Tartaglia in her mid-forties, following her divorce. After twenty years together, Scott ends their relationship with no explanation. Dying Times is a previously published novella in which Francesca faces the imminent deaths of her mother, her mentor, and an important client – all at the same time. Together, the two books create a poignant meditation on finality, loss, and the subtle new beginnings they can present us with.
Madott sets the stage with “Appropriation.” Fifteen-year-old Francesca pines away for Teddy Jansen, dreaming he’ll be her first kiss, until one night, when Dale Dick forces himself on Francesca and kisses her. Francesca is distraught. But the next morning, to her surprise, her sister Rosa has a message from Teddy: she presses her lips against Francesca’s and kisses her. By opening the collection with a stolen first kiss, Madott establishes the pattern of what a closing ceremony will look like. After all, you can never have your first kiss a second time; once that curtain closes, it can never open again. But, as Madott shows, it can open the way for something unexpected to happen, something more valuable than if you had simply gotten what you wanted.
This raises the fundamental question at the heart of the book: does love share the finality and irreversibility of a first kiss? Once your heart is broken, can you ever love again? And what doors can be opened by betrayal and loss? The unique approach Madott takes on these problems comes from the fact that Francesca gets a second chance at love until it too is taken away, in her seventies – which gives the struggle to heal a much higher order of magnitude. The stories that follow “Appropriation” explore the turmoil that rages within Francesca’s heart after Scott leaves, and they can be read as possible answers to these questions.
At first, “What to Do In Case of Hurricane” feels like an interlude from the overarching story of Francesca and Scott, appearing just as we begin to really feel her pain and wish she had a manual that could have prepared her for such a devasting betrayal. After Jane Pierce is whisked away to an island vacation by William Reilly O’Grady, a total stranger, they end up together for years, until Jane discovers William got another woman pregnant, a clear echo of Francesca’s ordeal. The story is interspersed with passages from a Jamaican Paradise Resort survival guide, and the irony is that, given how Scott’s departure came with the suddenness and force of a hurricane, instructions like – Leave before the water rises and covers the roads that can take you to safety – seem almost impossible to follow, and maybe that’s Madott’s point.
In “Taking Inventory,” Francesca’s house is broken into, and she’s forced to take inventory of the items that were stolen. Here, Madott’s handling of psychological nuance really shines: not only does Francesca take inventory of what has been stolen, she also takes inventory of the way her own actions made the crime possible in the first place, blaming herself for not securing the bolt on the doors; and she takes inventory of what the loss means to her. Madott maneuvers through these layers of meaning with great skill and dexterity, and again one can hear the symbolic echoes of Scott’s betrayal.
Soon, Francesca reaches a turning point:
In the shattering, I felt disoriented, confused, physically dizzy, and nauseated. Who was he? Who was I? And this relentless questioning led to a far more important question: Who am I? With this shattering and questioning began the journey inward.
This brings us back to the stolen first kiss. Just like how Dale stealing Francesca’s first kiss opened the door for Francesca receiving a kiss from Teddy through the lips of her sister – a kiss made special because it was born through loss – Scott’s betrayal had inadvertently given Francesca back herself.
In Dying Times, Madott uses short-rapid fire scenes, almost vignettes, to describe how Francesca’s mother, her mentor, and an important client, all die, “taking their own sweet time, defying predictions.” Metaphorically, she writes the way Picasso painted, capturing different aspects of the same event at the same time, evoking feelings of a montage. What stands out most is how the lingering resentment between Francesca and her sister Elizabeth rises to the surface while their mother deteriorates, her death not bringing them closer together, but rather driving them further apart.
Having these two works in the same volume almost gives Dying Times an entirely new meaning. Even though the story is identical to the one originally published in 2021, it feels re-written. On its own, the story of Francesca and her sister is somewhat grim; Madott does not give us the moment of reconciliation we might have thought was coming, which makes the story so much more raw, even brutally honest, at times. But we can now look at Dying Times through the skeleton key of the stolen first kiss. When a curtain closes, the door that opens is not just any door – it’s an unexpected one. You don’t expect the kiss you so desperately wanted to arrive through the lips of someone else; you don’t expect betrayal and abandonment to give you back yourself. We’re left to wonder what this says about death itself – the ultimate closing ceremony.
When Francesca compares a photo of herself in labour to a photo of her father dying, his belly distended from dialysis, “pregnant with death,” Madott gives us perhaps her most suggestive commentary on the nature of loss:
I believe birthing gives a woman a preview of the final agony, what it will be like. Birthing somehow prepares a woman for dying. Of course, at the end of those birth pains there is a child. What lies at the end of dying? Dare I call it a false pregnancy? What would that imply, what would that mean? That maybe we wait in queue for rebirthing?
Maybe in the book, taken as a whole, Madott is attempting to answer the question: what lies at the end of dying?
Closing Ceremonies and Dying Times forces us to confront an idealized image of old age. We probably imagine that all the questions of love, sex, trust, and betrayal will be settled once and for all. We probably imagine that all the bumps in the road will have been passed over for good. We probably imagine the precious time we’ll spend with our loved ones, as if they’ll all still be alive and well. Of course, life isn’t like that. This, however, shouldn’t be taken as a negative outlook. There is something liberating in shedding an ideal that is no longer useful, as painful as it may be to let go. It can open you to new experiences, new inner horizons that might otherwise have been impossible to reach. And this is exactly where Darlene Madott takes us.
Daniel Scarcello has a degree in Philosophy from the University of Toronto. Currently, he works for Vaughan Public Libraries where he hosts writing workshops for adults. His first book, I By Fire, about an author who writes a novel by letting coincidences determine the plot and begins to question his reality, is in search of a publisher. His blog, “A Collection of Coincidences,” is available on Substack. Daniel lives in Woodbridge, Ontario.
