When you spend your life helping others face death, what happens when death comes for someone you love? Michael thought he understood grief. He was wrong.
As a hospice chaplain, Michael had mastered the art of being present for the dying. He knew the right prayers, the right silences, the perfect balance between comfort and truth. He had sat beside hundreds of deathbeds, held countless grieving hands, and offered solace to families in their darkest moments. He had templates for everything, scripts for every kind of loss. Death was his profession, his calling, his carefully controlled domain.
Then his younger brother David died suddenly, and everything changed. The Living Learn to Bury Their is a raw and unflinching memoir about the year following David's death, when Michael's carefully constructed faith began to crumble and the platitudes he had offered others rang hollow in his own ears. His journey reveals the unexpected ways grief reshapes identity, tests relationships, and forces us to rebuild our understanding of faith, purpose, and what it means to keep living when part of you has died too.
SAMPLE - CHAPTER 1:
The beeping started at 2:47 AM. I know because I checked my watch, a reflex from years of noting times in patient charts. Mrs. Alvarez's blood pressure was dropping. The monitor sang its insistent alarm, and her daughter gripped my hand, not her mother's hand, mine, as if I could anchor her to a world where this wasn't happening.
"Is she in pain?" Sofia asked.
I looked at Mrs. Alvarez's face, slack now, the morphine doing its work. "No," I said. "She's not in pain."
Sofia started crying, those awful hiccupping sobs that sound like drowning. I stayed. I didn't say anything about God's plan or how her mother had lived a full life or any of the garbage people think they're supposed to say. I just sat there, my hand going numb in her grip, watching an old woman's chest rise and fall, rise and fall, rise and not fall again.
Mrs. Alvarez died at 3:14 AM. I noted the time. I called the nurse. I prayed the words I've prayed dozens of times, hundreds maybe, words smooth as river stones from repetition. Then my phone rang at 3:18 AM. It was my mother. Her voice was small, a child's voice. "Michael. They said David is..."
The hallway tilted. I put my hand against the wall. What hospital? I asked. She told me. Fifteen minutes from where I stood. "I'm coming," I said. "Mom, I'm coming right now."
I don't remember the drive. Memory is selective that way. It films certain scenes in high definition and leaves others completely dark.
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