OH, those Christmas Letters; they arrive in your mailbox spreading good cheer and BS. Danni Morford's Christmas Letters are different. Danni's humor helped her through her family's long battle with addiction. Year after year, she writes and sends Christmas Letters. She humorously and courageously relays the hard truths about her family's struggles: drug use, arrests, DUIs, treatment centers, and AA meetings.As addiction takes a tragically life-changing hold on her family, and she subsequently loses her son Travis to the disease, her strength prevails. The year after her son's death, she bravely writes and sends that letter: "Our family is not ashamed to say Travis died from addiction. In telling Travis's story, we hope that others will learn about the disease of addiction and lives can be saved."Danni continues those letters and begins writing to Travis as a way to feel a continued connection to him and to deal with her emotions. In, Shoot My Ashes from a Cannon, Danni shares all of her letters, her personal experience with Al-Anon, and how she has found purpose in following through on her promise to Travis.This is a must read all the way around and will help you understand more about grief, loss, and the prevalent struggle with addiction. Danni has shared her letters as her way to honor her son's life and legacy and to bring awareness to the horrible disease of addiction.

“Discharged from a hospital just means you’re not dead.” These words of Ralph B. Lilly, M.D., describe his early struggle to recover from a traumatic brain injury. Lilly was a forty-four-year-old practicing neurologist sitting on his motorcycle at a red light when a drunk driver rear-ended him in 1980. In the ICU, after regaining consciousness and being told what happened, he asked, “What’s a hospital? What’s a motorcycle?” This tragic experience transformed his life and his approach to his neurology practice: doctors treat those with brain injury; but loved ones heal them. Second Lives: The Journey of Brain Injury Survivors and Their Healers is written by Dr. Lilly and Diane F. Kramer. After his death in 2021, Kramer completed the book with the assistance of Lilly’s wife Joyce Stamp Lilly. This memoir weaves together Ralph Lilly’s experience with a collage of stories about his patients and their healers. After his recovery, Lilly retrained in the emerging field of behavioral neurology, which focuses on behavior, memory, cognition, and emotion after brain injury. His clinical skills and expert witness testimony were sought by physicians, survivors, families, and attorneys to secure the best “second life” for survivors. His many patients marveled at his uniquely compassionate approach: “What doctor gives you his cell number and says call any time?” Lilly’s pioneering career spanned forty years from Brown University’s Butler Psychiatric Hospital in Rhode Island to Nexus Health System and private practice in Houston, Texas. He treated ER and hospital inpatients whose loved ones were in acute quandary, as well as outpatients who’d long given up finding a doctor who knew how to help. Lilly’s memoir is full of heart, not science, and will provide insight to general readers, family, and friends of patients with brain injury, as well as those who treat them. His narration is unintentionally poignant, often punctuated by wry humor. He generously incorporates the words of his patients and their families in telling their stories. Their gratitude for his care is profound. As one former patient said, “Without Dr. Lilly, I’d be dead or in jail.”