There's a book I've been carrying around for a long time now, long before I ever wrote a single word of it down. I'm finally ready to tell you it's coming.
Twenty-One Days and Forever: Amanda's Story will be releasing soon on Amazon.
This is my daughter's story. It's also mine, since the two were never really separate to begin with. I was seventeen years old when I brought Amanda into this world, and she was thirty-one when COVID took her from it, twenty-one days after she was admitted to the hospital. Twenty-one days that changed everything about who I am, and forever that I've been trying to figure out how to keep living without her.
This book is everything I never got to say to her in time, and everything I've learned about grief, about love, about faith, and about myself in the years since. It's not always easy to read. It wasn't easy to write, either. But it's honest, all the way through, because that's the only way I knew how to write it.
I split the book into two parts. The first is Before — who she was, the life she lived, the illness that took her, and the twenty-one days I spent fighting for her in a hospital room five hours from home. The second is After — everything that came since. The grief. The signs I still believe are her, finding ways to reach me. The slow, uneven work of learning how to keep going.
If you read my first book, Dear Management, thank you for being here already. If this is the first time you're finding me, welcome. Either way, I'm glad you're here for this one, because this is the book I was always going to write eventually, whether I was ready or not.
I'll be sharing more here as the release gets closer — cover reveal, release date, and a few more pieces of Amanda's story along the way. For now, I just wanted you to know it's coming.
Thank you for reading this far. Thank you, in advance, for reading her story.
— Kayla