I knew I'd love this: I'd devoured Nina's (I feel as though we are on a first name basis now) Modern Love essay on buying a couch. I can relate to hyperfocusing on the mundane and domestic in order to crowd out the more sacred and profane business of life and death. She was a friend of a friend as well, no doubt we have other connections. North Carolina can be a very small place. 
 Since my dad's death from cancer in 2004, I've made a habit of reading cancer memoirs of a type. I like the left behind spouse's recollections; Joan Didion's A Year of Magical Thinking is the one I think of as the archetype. I have no interest in uplifting survivor stories, battles won, odds beaten. Don't get me wrong: I want that for every me who draws the short straw of cancer. I just don't feel compelled to read those books. 
 You don't have to be a shrink to figure it out. I want to see versions of what I know reflected back to me, to see that I am not alone. This is a cruel way to die. It's random, senseless. It assaults one's dignity and privacy at the end, two losses which always cut deep. Every moment in life is all we have, and yet some of these moments are utterly monstrous. How do you go on? How do you live with this truth? 
 No one gets easy answers or tidy epiphanies, at least not in my experience, and you won't find that here. Instead, poignant, honest, reflection, written with a poet's ear for lyricism. This is a beautifully crafted love letter to her family, and the love story of how they became of family. Read it, enjoy it, embrace it. We are all we have, and in the end, don't have at all.