Content Warning: This section references cancer and eating disorders.

Hadley Vlahos is a hospice nurse. She started her nursing career as a manager in a nursing home but switched to hospice after seeing hospice nurses spending meaningful time with their patients; she values The Impact of Human Connection and felt she could not engage with patients on a human level in more traditional medical settings. Her path to nursing was itself unconventional and born of necessity; she became a single mom at age 19, at which point she dropped out of college, enrolled in nursing school, and began building a stable life for herself and her son, Brody. The need to care for her son informs her commitment to her job, and in the memoir’s early chapters, she often overtasks herself, taking on extra patients and shifts and following all the rules even when instinct tells her she should bend them. Over the course of the book, she lets her experiences transform her into a more confident, intuitive person.

Vlahos mentions in her Introduction that she wanted to be a writer when she was young, and though she feels she found her vocation in hospice work, writing her

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