Blog Archives
Turning Fertile: The hardest roads lead to the most extraordinary arrivals
Sonali Sheetal Appikonda’s Turning Fertile is an intimate memoir about infertility, marriage, and learning to listen to a body she once treated as an obstacle to ambition. The story begins with her seven-year-old son performing at a violin recital, then circles back to her teenage years, when irregular cycles, facial hair, PCOS, and thyroid problems first entered her life. From there, Appikonda traces a demanding path through repeated IUIs, an unplanned IVF cycle, ovarian hyperstimulation, surgery, an excruciating tubal pregnancy, and finally the birth of her son. Framing the memoir with the recital gives the journey a satisfying shape: the child onstage is both the ending readers already know and the reason the story can finally be told.
What makes the book memorable is its attention to the ordinary details surrounding medical ordeals. A pharmacist understands a failed attempt when the husband returns for sanitary pads. A nurse protects Appikonda’s privacy after an uncomfortable scan. A handmade picture bought on a cold evening becomes a symbol of the life she and her husband nearly forgot to enjoy. Her husband is especially important to the book, not as a faultless rescuer but as the person who cooks after surgery, sits through appointments, carries hope when she can’t, and grieves privately when he thinks no one is watching. Their marriage gives the memoir its emotional center, while the costs, invasive procedures, workplace pressures, and family questions show how thoroughly infertility can occupy a couple’s life.
Appikonda writes as though she’s speaking across a table to someone living through a similar experience. The recurring “Dear Reader” passages make that intention explicit, blending memoir with reassurance and plain-language explanations of fertility treatments. Concrete numbers, including twenty-one retrieved eggs, twelve IUI cycles, and four brief days of pregnancy, keep the physical and emotional stakes from becoming abstract. Her repeated images of doors, waiting rooms, seasons, stitches, and bodily “messages” give the book a meditative quality. Some phrases and reflections recur often enough to slow the narrative, and the medical explanations occasionally interrupt a tense scene, but that repetition also mimics the exhausting cycle of hoping, waiting, and beginning again. The glossary at the end reinforces the book’s role as a companion as much as a personal history.
The readers most likely to appreciate Turning Fertile are people navigating infertility, PCOS, assisted reproduction, pregnancy loss, or the strain these experiences can place on a relationship. Their partners and close family members may find it equally valuable because the book shows forms of grief and support that patients don’t always voice. It will also speak to readers drawn to candid accounts of Indian family life, career ambition, migration, medicine, and marriage. Appikonda’s successful pregnancy gives her story its conclusion, but the book’s deeper subject is the life that continues during the waiting: work, love, travel, disappointment, and the gradual recovery of a self larger than any diagnosis.
Pages: 142 | ASIN : B0HFCD2YSW
Talent and Determination
A Life of Impact explores the career of transplant pioneer Samuel L. Kountz, MD, whose work advanced kidney transplantation, while his commitment to mentorship, education, and underserved patients pushed medical progress beyond technical innovation alone. What did you discover about your father during your research that you hadn’t fully understood while he was alive?
Perhaps the greatest discovery was the full magnitude of what my father had accomplished. I knew him first as my father, not as Samuel L. Kountz, the pioneering transplant surgeon. I understood that he was an accomplished physician and scientist, but I was young when he was at the height of his career and did not fully appreciate the barriers he had overcome or the breadth of his influence. Researching the book allowed me to see him through the eyes of his colleagues, trainees, patients, and the historical record. I came to understand more clearly how remarkable his journey was—from growing up in a small, segregated town in Arkansas to becoming an internationally recognized transplant surgeon. I was also struck by how consistently people remembered his generosity, optimism, and willingness to create opportunities for others. Writing the book allowed me to meet my father again, this time as an adult and as a physician myself.
Mentorship plays an important role throughout his story. Who were some of the people who helped make his path possible?
My father’s career is a wonderful example of what can happen when talent and determination encounter people willing to open doors. Senator J. William Fulbright helped make it possible for him to attend the University of Arkansas, where faculty members also recognized and nurtured his potential. Later, Dr. Roy Cohn became an important mentor and helped develop his interest in transplantation, while Dr. Norman Shumway, another giant in the field, was an important influence during those formative years.
One lesson I took from researching his life was how consequential mentorship can be. My father never forgot the people who helped him, and he spent much of his own career doing the same for students and young physicians, particularly those who might otherwise have been overlooked. Mentorship wasn’t simply something he benefited from; it became something he felt obligated to pass along.
What lessons from his career remain relevant to current conversations about health disparities and representation in medicine?
Unfortunately, many of the issues my father confronted remain with us. He entered medicine when opportunities for African Americans were severely limited, yet he refused to allow those limitations to define what he could accomplish. His concern about inequity also extended beyond his own career. He understood that advances in medicine have limited meaning if the people who need them cannot benefit from them.
His life reminds us that representation matters, but opportunity matters just as much. It is not enough to encourage talented young people from historically underrepresented backgrounds to pursue medicine. We also need mentors, institutions, and leaders willing to recognize their potential and create pathways for them to succeed. My father’s career demonstrates what can happen when those opportunities are provided—and how many patients and future physicians can ultimately benefit.
What do you hope medical students and young physicians learn from his combination of scientific ambition, service, and mentorship?
I hope they understand that these qualities do not have to compete with one another. My father was extraordinarily ambitious scientifically. He wanted to solve difficult problems, advance transplantation, and improve outcomes for patients. But he also believed that professional success carried an obligation to serve others.
For young physicians, his life offers a broader definition of impact. A successful career is not measured only by publications, titles, discoveries, or positions. It is also measured by the patients whose lives you improve, the people you mentor, the opportunities you create for others, and whether the work you began continues after you are gone. That, ultimately, is why I called the book A Life of Impact.
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
A Life of Impact: A Biography of Samuel L. Kountz, MD is a powerful and deeply human portrait of one of the most influential pioneers in transplant surgery. Spanning from the segregated cotton fields of rural Arkansas to the forefront of global medical innovation, this biography captures not only a scientific journey, but a story of resilience, courage, and transformation.
Born into a world shaped by racial inequality and limited opportunity, Samuel L. Kountz refused to be defined by circumstance. Through determination, intellect, and an unwavering commitment to healing, he rose to become a groundbreaking surgeon whose work helped reshape the future of kidney transplantation.
This book traces his early life in the American South, his education under systemic barriers, and the mentors and communities that shaped his path. It explores his entry into medicine during a period of scientific uncertainty, when transplant surgery was still experimental, risky, and often controversial. Against this backdrop, Kountz emerged as a leader who pushed the boundaries of what medicine could achieve.
More than a clinical biography, this work also examines the human dimensions of his journey. It delves into the emotional and ethical challenges of early transplantation, the realities of discrimination in medical institutions, and the burden of responsibility carried by those who pioneer life-saving procedures. It highlights his advocacy for equity in healthcare, his dedication to underserved communities, and his lasting influence on medical education and transplant ethics.
Through detailed narrative and historical depth, A Life of Impact presents a vivid account of a man whose legacy continues to shape modern medicine. It is a story of ambition forged through adversity, of science driven by compassion, and of a life devoted to expanding the limits of what is possible.
This book will appeal to readers interested in medical history, biographies of influential figures, healthcare ethics, and stories of perseverance against systemic barriers.
Love Beyond Eros
Love Beyond Eros, the third book in Chris Neo’s The Love Secret series, is an ambitious mix of romantic drama, psychological exploration, family story, and high-stakes adventure. The novel begins with Aris missing from the remote Greek village where his relationship with Angelica has reached a painful turning point, then quickly turns his disappearance into a life-or-death crisis. From there, the story keeps expanding, bringing friends, family members, military figures, enemies, and former lovers into an increasingly elaborate chain of events. That scope fits Neo’s stated purpose for the series: he wants an emotionally driven story that explores love and relationships while keeping the plot moving quickly. What makes the book distinctive is how fully it commits to that combination. Love here isn’t simply romantic attraction. It becomes the force behind friendship, loyalty, sacrifice, jealousy, forgiveness, parenthood, and the difficult choices people make when someone they care about is in danger.
The emotional center of the novel is Aris, but the story works through a large ensemble, and several of the most interesting developments happen because other characters are forced to reconsider who they are. Angelica’s devotion to Aris becomes fierce and protective. John and Uri discover that friendship means showing up even when they’re frightened, inconvenienced, or powerless to fix the situation. Varo has one of the book’s largest arcs, moving through obsession, suspicion, buried trauma, loyalty, and a growing understanding of her own past. Granny, Zoe, Gina, Adonis, and others each contribute another variation on the book’s central question: what does loving someone actually require of you? The title gradually earns its importance because the novel keeps pushing beyond eros, or romantic desire, toward agape, family bonds, friendship, compassion, and self-sacrifice. Angelica eventually gives that idea its clearest expression when she describes a love that reaches beyond eros, tying the title directly to the emotional argument the story has been building.
Neo tells all of this in a deliberately heightened style. The book moves from a Greek village and a mysterious poisoning into military flights, international maneuvering, assassins, rescues, betrayals, martial arts confrontations, family reunions, pregnancies, old romances, and long-delayed revelations. It has the energy of a serialized adventure, with short chapters and frequent shifts in location and perspective designed to keep another complication arriving just as the previous one settles. That can make the experience feel almost breathless, but it also gives the novel its personality. Serious conversations about love and identity can sit beside broad comedy, sensual scenes, action sequences, and larger-than-life characters without the story losing its basic emotional direction. By the final chapter and epilogue, the sprawling cast has been drawn back toward family, healing, changed relationships, and the possibility of another journey, giving the ending the feeling of both a conclusion and a continuation.
I’d recommend Love Beyond Eros most strongly to readers who enjoy emotionally intense stories that combine romance with adventure, family drama, friendship, danger, and questions about why people love the way they do. It should especially appeal to readers who like big casts, dramatic reversals, passionate dialogue, Greek cultural touches, and characters whose emotional growth matters as much as the physical action surrounding them. Since this is Book Three, it will have the greatest impact on readers who already know Aris, John, Uri, Varo, Angelica, and the relationships developed earlier in The Love Secret series. The novel asks for a reader willing to enter its heightened world and care about its characters with the same intensity that they care about one another. For that reader, this is a generous, eventful finale built around a sincere idea: desire may begin a love story, but loyalty, sacrifice, forgiveness, friendship, and family are what reveal how deep love can become.
Pages: 416 | ASIN : B0CXB6NQTL
Grief and Loss
Pablo follows a beloved dog who is separated from his family and embarks on an unexpected journey home, forming an unlikely friendship and discovering the meaning of love, courage, and belonging along the way. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The inspiration for the setup of Pablo’s story was one that just hit me all at once in a flash! A good friend of mine challenged me to write something, and I had long pondered that conversation – even debating with myself on what I wanted to write. Then the idea for Pablo hit me like a lightning bolt. I literally had the entire story laid out in my head in a flash of creative sorcery. It was remarkable! As I started flushing the idea out further, and being that PABLO is a Mexican dog, I had the idea to write PABLO in English with Spanish words and phrases. So children can learn some Spanish while reading the book. Then, when my mother suddenly passed away, I was grieving and had the idea to incorporate the Five Stages of Grief into the book to help parents and educators openly discuss grief and loss with children. I thought to myself, “If I can help one child deal with what I’m dealing with right now, it will all be worth it”. The response has been amazing. The grief component is really resonating with librarians and parents alike, and I’m very thankful for that.
The story combines comedy, adventure, and moments of grief. How did you balance those very different emotional tones for young readers?
The comedic and adventure components of PABLO can naturally flow while flushing out the story. The grief component was far more challenging. I wanted to subtly weave the Five Stages of grief into the book without forcing the Five Stages down readers’ throats. I wanted to make sure I handled all the stages of grief properly, but subtly, to make sure each stage was easily accessible to children and parents/educators. The lesson plan at the back of the book encourages open discussion about grief and loss with children, and the work Missy did with us on that is invaluable. There are also further lesson plan materials on our website at www.kidstori.com
How did you and illustrator Irvin Walkes work together to develop the visual world of Pablo?
Irvin did a remarkable job with the art on PABLO. It took almost three years to complete, as every page was hand-drawn and painted. Our process was not unlike Disney films of old, with the art. I always wanted to create a 1070’s throwback feel with a modern twist, and Irvin accomplished all that and more! There was Irvin the artist, Jason (Publisher), Rob (designer), and I getting together weekly to review and work on all the art. Some panels magically worked right away, while others took years of revisions. Irvin would board the panel, and we would tweak the art tirelessly to make sure it was perfect before we advanced to color or texture. If we did not like something, even the smallest little detail, Irvin went back to the drawing board, starting the panel from scratch until we all felt it was just right. We have thousands of iterations of the different panels of art in the book.
Do you see more adventures ahead for Pablo and his family?
Well… There may just be an easter egg in PABLO setting up a sequel… See if you can find it. 🙂
OH! – And when you finish reading PABLO, don’t forget to play PABLO: The Video Game! We spent three years working on that as well, and we feel it is a wonderful complement to the book!
Evenings on the Edge of Death
Evenings on the Edge of Death is Theodore McDowell’s deeply personal work of poeticized nonfiction, built from memories of childhood trauma, dementia, family violence, mental illness, marriage, addiction, faith, and grief. McDowell arranges the book as a series of emotional collages, moving through his relationships with his mother, father, sister, wife, and finally toward his own reckoning with aging and death. The form suits the subject beautifully. Memory rarely arrives in neat chronological order, especially when trauma and dementia are involved, and these pieces return again and again to certain images, gestures, places, and wounds. A nursing home window, a childhood beach, a glass of whiskey, a cathedral, a river, a garden, a hand reaching for another hand. The repetition gives the book the feeling of someone sorting through a lifetime and asking which memories have shaped him, which have damaged him, and which might still save him.
Some of the book’s strongest writing comes from McDowell’s willingness to hold love and injury in the same frame. His father can be frightening, abusive, wounded, and finally vulnerable. His mother is nurturing and beloved, but she also becomes inseparable from the complicated family history she helped sustain. His sister Rachel carries the scars of abuse into mental illness, addiction, and suicide, leaving her brother with grief that refuses any easy resolution. The poems about her are particularly haunting because McDowell keeps reaching past the manner of her death toward the girl she once was, the sister who danced, painted, dreamed, and made him feel safe. That movement is central to the whole book. He keeps trying to recover the person from the tragedy. Even forgiveness remains complicated. It isn’t presented as a clean moral achievement, but as something unfinished, painful, necessary, and sometimes beyond reach. The book understands that family love can survive alongside anger, and that grief often keeps both alive.
The later sections widen the emotional range as McDowell turns toward marriage, aging, illness, and the possibility of losing his own memory. His marriage becomes another place where the past keeps pressing on the present, but it’s also where tenderness, endurance, physical intimacy, disappointment, forgiveness, and companionship are allowed to coexist. The spiritual dimension grows richer here as well. Christianity is central, but McDowell’s religious imagination is restless and searching, filled with cathedrals, crucifixes, resurrection, Buddhist meditation, prayer, nature, doubt, and an almost physical hunger for grace. He repeatedly finds the sacred in ordinary things: cards played on a porch, hands joined during a walk, flowers in a garden, a wife waiting beside a hospital bed. One of the book’s most affecting ideas is that remembering someone can itself become an act of love. After his mother’s death, the speaker understands himself as her “memory keeper,” carrying her forward through stories and gestures passed to another generation.
By the final pages, Evenings on the Edge of Death has become more than a record of what happened to one family. It’s an inquiry into what remains after memory fails, bodies weaken, relationships fracture, and the people who knew our stories disappear. McDowell doesn’t leave the reader stranded in that darkness. His final movement toward self-creation and grace feels earned precisely because the book has spent so much time among bruises, hospital rooms, graves, addictions, regrets, and unanswered prayers. In the closing poem, fly fishing becomes an image of casting back into memory and trauma while still standing in the living current, and the book ends with the possibility of being made new even in old age. Evenings on the Edge of Death turns a lifetime of bruises, broken memories, love, and loss into something enduring: a testament to the stubborn grace that can still find us when almost everything else has slipped away.
Pages: 171 | ASIN : B0CVJ4PR85
PABLO
Pablo, written by Mar Andersons and illustrated by Irvin Walkes, is a lively children’s adventure about a beach-town dog in Mexico whose life suddenly takes an unexpected turn. Pablo is excited about becoming a father, but a trip to a resort leads to him being mistaken for a stray, taken away, and eventually transported all the way to Seattle. From there, the story becomes a cross-country journey as Pablo tries to get back to Arianna and their new puppies. Along the way, he meets Grandma Joan, a lonely widow traveling in an RV, and their separate stories gradually come together in a way that gives the book more emotional weight than its wild opening might suggest.
The story moves quickly and has a playful sense of humor. Pablo is dramatic, expressive, and constantly reacting to whatever bizarre situation he lands in next, whether he’s wearing a pink dress, escaping through a backyard, flying toward a highway, or helping Joan change a flat tire. The rhyming text keeps the pace energetic, and the Spanish words scattered throughout the story give Pablo a distinctive voice while also introducing young readers to simple vocabulary. A Spanish-to-English glossary near the end helps readers understand words such as amor, familia, gracias, and corazón. The humor and action make the book fun to read aloud, while Pablo’s determination to get home gives all that chaos a clear purpose.
The illustrations are fantastic. Walkes uses bold colors, exaggerated expressions, dramatic perspectives, and almost cinematic scenes to make Pablo’s journey feel big. Some pages are bright and cartoonish, such as the resort scenes with the mischievous twins, while others become darker and more atmospheric when Pablo is frightened or lost. The scene with the enormous cat Buttons feels almost like a suspense movie, while later pages showing Pablo and Joan traveling down the coast become warmer and calmer. The final beach scenes are especially striking, with soft sunset colors and the whole family gathered together by the water. The pictures don’t simply repeat what the text says. They add jokes, emotion, movement, and small visual details that give readers more to notice each time through the book.
What gives Pablo its heart is the way the adventure becomes a story about family, grief, companionship, and finding your way home. Pablo spends most of the book trying to return to Arianna, while Joan is quietly trying to cope with losing her husband. Their friendship helps both of them move forward. By the time they reach Mexico, Pablo is reunited with his family, and Joan finds a new sense of connection with them as well. The book even includes a section for adults about talking to children about grief, connecting Joan’s experiences to the stages of grief shown throughout the story. Pablo packs comedy, action, Spanish vocabulary, and some tender moments into one energetic story, making it a colorful read that can entertain kids while also opening the door to conversations about love, loss, responsibility, and belonging.
Pages: 53 | ISBN : 978-1-7381704-0-1
The Invisible Soul Anthology: Healing With Words
The Invisible Soul Anthology, by George Beasley, is a deeply personal and inspirational Christian memoir built from nearly fifty stories, reflections, memories, and poems about trauma, faith, family, grief, mental health, and healing. Beasley describes the collection as a journey from hidden struggles toward emotional healing and redemption, and that idea gives the book its shape. Readers are led through memories as they surface, taking them from childhood abuse and group homes to marriage, fatherhood, ministry, therapy, loss, and the quieter moments that have helped him make sense of it all. As a faith-based memoir, the book feels personal in the way a long conversation with someone can be personal. Beasley isn’t standing at a distance from these experiences. He’s writing from inside them.
One of the most compelling parts of this trauma recovery memoir is the way ordinary places and objects become containers for much larger emotions. A sandbar becomes a place of belonging, a river becomes an image of grief and the undertow of despair, a childhood closet holds both terror and an imagined fire of hope, and a catfish pond becomes a mental refuge first learned in a group home and rediscovered decades later through therapy. These recurring images give the book its own language. Beasley also writes openly about suicidal thoughts, childhood trauma, triggers, therapy, and the difficult work of recognizing emotions he spent much of his life avoiding. That makes The Invisible Soul Anthology as much a mental health memoir as it is a Christian testimony. Faith and professional help aren’t treated as competing ideas here. They become parts of the same healing journey.
The heart of the collection, though, is connection. Beasley returns again and again to the people who helped him survive and grow: his wife Lisa, his daughters and grandchildren, his brothers, old friends, therapists, house parents, ministry partners, and even people encountered briefly along the way. Some of the strongest pieces look at relationships from the distance of many years and allow an old memory to take on a different meaning. In “Was It Love or Was It…,” for example, what he carried as childhood betrayal gradually becomes an understanding of his mother’s desperate attempt to protect him. That willingness to revisit the past is central to this Christian healing book. The prose is direct, emotionally exposed, and often devotional, with scripture and faith woven naturally into the author’s interpretation of what happened and why those experiences still matter.
What stayed with me most is the book’s conviction that words can become part of the healing process. Beasley repeatedly shows writing as a way of bringing buried memories into the light, giving language to pain, and leaving something useful for the people who come afterward. Late in the collection, he writes about opening himself to emotions while spending time with his grandchildren and discovering that something as simple as giving them his time can become an expression of love and a repair of what was missing in his own childhood. That captures The Invisible Soul Anthology well. It’s a Christian memoir about healing, but it’s also an anthology about being seen, listening closely, loving people while there’s still time, and finding meaning in memories that once seemed too painful to revisit. Readers drawn to inspirational Christian books, spiritual memoirs, and trauma recovery stories will find plenty here to sit with long after the final page.
Pages: 275 | ASIN : B0HD3W8G2V
Grief, Hardship, and Loss
Held in the Vanishing is an intimate memoir about caring for your parents who have different forms of dementia while balancing marriage, parenting, work, and grief. What inspired you to share your family’s experiences with readers?
Held in the Vanishing is truly an intimate sharing of my family’s story. I really didn’t hold anything back. Each chapter—or, rather, each vignette—began as a journal entry or vivid memory from the past six years. So when pen first hit paper, I wasn’t writing for anyone other than myself.
Journaling is an outlet for me. It’s a safe place to release whatever my mind, body, and soul are carrying. I don’t have to worry about whether any of it makes sense because it’s just for me. But the power of journaling comes when I see the words take shape on the page. Suddenly I can encounter an experience or emotion almost as if I’ve stepped onto a balcony and am looking down upon it. I can see more of it—objectively, but still in its raw form. Writing has a way of unconcealing meaning I couldn’t see before, or disclosing a perspective that wasn’t available to me while I was in the thick of the experience.
And I don’t just write in my journal. I go back and reread what I’ve written. I reflect on it. I learn from it. I grow from it.
Over time, as I reread these entries, I began to see a story taking shape—my story. And I began to wonder whether other people living through similar grief, hardship, and loss might see something of themselves in it.
So one weekend, I sat down and started stitching the entries together.
After I finished my first draft, I gave it to my neighbor, who works for a Denver-based nonprofit providing senior living and care, and asked her whether she thought it was worth sharing. Her response was a resounding yes: other people needed to read this story.
That’s when I decided to publish it.
My hope is that Held in the Vanishing helps caregivers feel less alone in this God-awful journey. I also hope people who love or know caregivers come away with a better understanding of what caregiving can ask of a person. It’s a chapter of life that isn’t understood well enough. It isn’t honored or respected enough. And it is terribly under-resourced, which only adds to the hardship of living it.
Maybe telling my story this openly and vulnerably can bring a little more light to that.
But more than anything, I want people experiencing this kind of loss and grief to recognize themselves somewhere in these pages and know they aren’t alone—not in what they think, not in what they feel, and not in the impossible decisions they sometimes have to make.
You begin by showing your parents as vibrant people within a multigenerational household. Why was it important to establish who they were before dementia?
Knowing who my parents are is integral to knowing who I am.
I never wanted this story to be about dementia. It’s more about what dementia steals from us—what it’s stealing from my parents and how the life we shared is being stolen. It’s also about how it shapes and changes us.
The opening chapter paints a picture of the life we built together because readers need to understand what we had to understand what is being lost—and what continues to change. We had a beautifully shared life—my parents, my husband, my son, and me. It was everything I had ever wanted. That life deserves to be remembered, and my parents deserve to be known not just as two people living with dementia, but as the vibrant, funny, loving people they are.
That’s one of the hardest things about this kind of loss: remembering who my parents have always been while continuing to discover who they are becoming—and who I am becoming.
You write honestly about anger, resentment, exhaustion, and guilt. Why was it important not to soften those emotions?
These are real emotions that come with caregiving. We’re not given the option to soften them.
My story is real. There’s nothing made up or embellished. If I had softened the anger, resentment, exhaustion, or guilt, I wouldn’t have been authentic with myself or with my readers—especially other caregivers who know these emotions all too well.
How could they see themselves in my story if I wasn’t willing to let them see all of me?
I think there’s something important in acknowledging that we can feel anger and resentment and still love deeply. We can be exhausted and still show up. We can question our decisions and still be doing the best we know how to do. Those emotions aren’t evidence that we’re failing at caregiving. They’re part of being human while doing something extraordinarily hard.
What do you hope caregivers recognize about themselves when they read your story?
I hope caregivers recognize that they are living an impossibly hard life and that it’s ok to break down. It’s ok to realize that our love for the people we’re caring for can change colors. Sometimes it’s gray and dull. Sometimes it’s black and blue. Sometimes it’s red and fiery. And that’s ok.
As caregivers, we get to feel whatever we feel. And that can include every emotion imaginable—guilt, shame, resentment, anger, and even hate. None of those feelings means we don’t love deeply.
My story isn’t intended to offer guidance or advice, and I certainly don’t want it to be preachy. But through journaling and the hard inner work I did along the way, I learned how to hold my parents while also learning to hold myself.
If my story can offer another caregiver even a glimmer of hope or reassurance that whatever they’re feeling, it’s ok—that they’re ok—then I’ll feel good about having shared it.
Author Links: GoodReads | LinkedIn | Facebook | Website | Amazon
Responsibility flooded her days, and in the long vigilance of care, her own life began to disappear alongside her parents’.
Love didn’t disappear. It changed color.
Strange, unfamiliar — yet unmistakably love.
Held in the Vanishing is an unflinching memoir of caregiving written from inside that unraveling. Told in brief vignettes, Mougne traces what it means to hold two parents and a family together — what is given, what is neglected, and what must be carried without language.
This is not a story of redemption or tidy acceptance. It stays with erosion and disappearance, and with the quiet reckoning that follows: losing your family as you knew them, losing yourself alongside them, and slowly finding the stillness necessary to hear your own voice again.
For anyone walking the long, unfinished middle of caregiving, Held in the Vanishing offers companionship, witness, and a measure of comfort in the darkest days.
