Prologue: Encomium

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.