Twenty-One Days and Forever: Amanda's Story

Amanda Lynn was thirty-one years old when COVID-19 took her life, twenty-one days after she was admitted to the hospital, five hours from home. Twenty-One Days and Forever: Amanda's Story is the true account of those twenty-one days, and of everything that came after.Told in two parts, Before and After, this memoir brings readers into the hospital room, into the impossible medical decisions no parent should have to make, and into the years of grief, faith, and quiet transformation that followed. Author Kayla Stone writes with unflinching honesty about the difficult parts of her daughter's story - a childhood shaped by an absent, abusive father; a healthcare system that denied a dying young woman's own requests for treatment; a mother's anger and doubt in the face of unbearable loss - and with equal honesty about what carried her through: a promise kept at another hospital bedside years earlier, an inexplicable moment of comfort felt in the early morning hours of her daughter's final days, and a daughter's stubborn, funny, deeply loved spirit that continues to make its presence known.Twenty-One Days and Forever is a memoir about losing a child, and about what a mother chooses to carry forward, and what she ultimately chooses to set down. It will resonate with readers of grief literature, faith-based memoir, and anyone who has weathered loss during the COVID-19 pandemic.