When Brunell's younger daughter, twenty-year-old Megan, died in an automobile accident on a rainy bridge, Brunell was planning her second wedding and the birth of her first grandchild. Within twenty-four hours, she catapulted from ecstasy to complete devastation. Ten years later, Brunell penned this journey "to help others find peace."

Brunell approaches tragedy uniquely by easing into the subject of death. She traces her losses, starting with the family dog when she was three years old. She was five when her grandfather died, but death didn't scare her because she felt his spirit and knew he was in heaven. John F. Kennedy died when she was in fourth grade, followed by her friends and her father. Each time, Brunell was unusually sensitive to their passing, and this spirituality brought her comfort. As part of coping, she suggests being unafraid of losing loved ones because the more friends and family one has, and the longer one lives, the more people one loses.

With gentle language and helpful examples from her own life, Brunell advises that when death does happen, the best course is to "Pull yourself together before it's too late." There is a difference between grieving and mourning: grief is sad, but mourning is deeper, more intense, lasts longer, and is perfectly normal. No two people experience loss the same, but attending support groups for parents who have lost children, as well as sessions with psychics, helped the author immensely. She shares details of these in loving, straightforward prose. Especially poignant is her realization that senior citizens are a particularly vulnerable population because they experience much loss. With great empathy and instruction, Brunell urges readers not to fight death but to accept it, moving on to the next step, while accepting the signs the dead share from beyond.

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