Question: How do you get over it? Answer: You don't. You don't want to. It makes you who you are. Sean Murphy lost his mother days after her fifty-ninth birthday, following a five-year battle with cancer. In this eloquent memoir, he explores his family history through the context of grief, compassion, faith, and the cultivation of an artistic sensibility. Unfolding in a range of voices, brutal and tender in its portrayal of terminal illness, Please Talk about Me When I'm Gone is an unyielding love story, in which devotion and memory are capable of transcending death. I will be serializing this memoir with a new chapter twice a week, on Friday and Sunday.

People will tell you that when one door closes, another opens. But these things are not necessarily simultaneous. When you shut the door on your past, there's a time when you're in darkness, scrabbling around for the handle to the door to the future. And you've got to decide who's going to walk through that door.

"She wanted peace, but she had no idea what a nightmare she pulled her loved ones in. " My best friend gave up a while ago. In other words, she killed herself. Since then, we've all been a wreck. This is a book for every person who had to go through the guilt.

The Adventure of Byron and Jacobis -- Kendall Daddo and his children invite you to join them as they drive down the highway on a short road trip to spend the afternoon with Grandpa. During the drive, Kendall, as usual, seizes the opportunity to pass the time by telling the children a story. Join them as they break through the confines of minivan space and enter the world of an adventurous boy, named Byron, and an interesting little man, named Jacobis, whom Byron met one day while enjoying the company of one of his dearest friends, Old Oaken, a magnificent mature oak tree that is neatly tucked away at the edge of a clearing in the middle of the woods that grow just a short bike ride outside of Byron's town.

Dating back in college was a horror for an overweight girl. Guys chose the skinny girls over the fuller-figured ones any day, and getting a date for an event became a nightmare. Never mind that I was on the Dean's List, never mind that I was the editor of my college newspaper or that I was a published poet, never mind that people complimented my taste in clothes or that I always had a smile on my face. Forget that I made sure I was always up-to-date on the news so that I could converse on just about any topic. None of that mattered on date night. The same young men who asked for my help in Composition and Rhetoric or Advanced Statistics didn't know I existed when they were looking for someone to ask out for Friday night. They gave me a casual "Hi" as they passed me by on campus or in town on a weekend evening. They were looking for a hot date and I didn't qualify. To make matters worse, my female friends were all thin girls. One girl in my dorm who was slender and gorgeous had allergies to many different foods, so she had very little choice in what she could eat. I started wishing I had allergies. This poor girl literally couldn't eat, and I envied her.