Author's Preface I was always confident that my children would remain reasonably healthy. They would never succumb to any life-threatening illness-after all, I believed, I could never survive anything like that, so therefore it would not happen. For many years, I had worked as an ICU nurse, caring for people who were critically ill. Always mindful and empathetic about their mental and physical well-being, I had a healthy objectivity that was necessary to deliver essential supports for healing. In April of 2008, my twenty-five-year-old daughter, Deirdre, had been teaching in Japan for a year....