Grief Addiction

Nat Idle, a San Francisco writer with a medical degree, narrowly survives an explosion in an Internet cafe after a stranger hands him a note warning him to exit immediately. The handwriting on the note belongs to his deceased girlfriend, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist whom he has...

Have you ever felt like life was finally going well, when suddenly life decides to throw you a curve ball? Life will knock you down when you least expect it. The important thing is not how or why we got knocked down, the important thing is how will we respond? In her early 40's, Nadine found herself to be a newly successful entrepreneur...and simultaneously...the mother of a heroin addict. She used this situation to create an out-of- the-box therapeutic travel recovery project which later evolved into establishing a nonprofit serving those choosing to live a lifestyle of recovery.

This extraordinary investigation of the death of the author's grandson yields a powerful memoir of addiction, grief, and the stories we choose to tell our families and ourselves. Jared Kindred left his home and family at the age of eighteen, choosing to wander across America on freight train...

While it's tough to understand what leads a person into addiction - to witness someone you love kind-of kill herself - the truth is that you can learn from it. By the time Céline died at age 30, she was Kermit The Frog green and she vomited blood more frequently than she was able to eat. In less than a decade, she had gone from summa cum laude Columbia graduate to NYU PhD student to unemployed, rambling, stumbling drunk saddled with a cirrhotic liver beyond repair.