I was thinking about a child’s holding on. I was thinking about guardian spirits.

Peter Bruun

Best-selling author Melissa Nathan, 37, set out to write “a rather unusual set of acknowledgements” to start the last book she’d ever write, one she knew would be published after she died. That she had Sammy in her life at all was a miracle – her first round of breast cancer five years earlier left her doubting she’d be able to conceive, and she and husband Andrew Saffron were thrilled to welcome Sammy two years after her first diagnosis. Their joy was soon suffused with anguish as doctors discovered her cancer had spread to her liver and bones. Time short, Melissa wrote notes and stories for Sammy to read when he was older and wrapped presents for his next 15 Christmases. In her final words to him, poignant and characteristically unsentimental, she wished her newly minted 3-year-old happiness, and solace in the knowledge that he had been everything to her, that being his mother had brought her meaning in her last days.