Mom, Interrupted

A Young Family Faces Cancer

American writer Ernest Hemingway is credited with coining the phrase “All true stories end in death.”  John S. Viehweg agrees that death may be a part of all true stories, but they certainly don’t end there. In Mom Interrupted: A Young Family Faces Cancer, he tells a story about a death, but also a story about a life, and how life goes on after the death of a loved one.

This book began as a series of e-mailed updates to immediate family members once the author and Lana Ray Viehweg, his wife of almost twenty years, discovered, on October 30, 2003, that she had a lump in her left breast. Then, through the miracle of e-mail forwarding, what began as a practical attempt to keep family informed quickly exploded into an expanding group of widely separated friends who all seemed to be connected by a love for Lana and a need to know what was happening to her.

Mom Interrupted: A Young Family Faces Cancer is a dramatic account of a real family’s journey through discovery, diagnosis and treatment that, because of its precipitous and accelerating twists and surprises, reads more like a thriller.  The narrative is built around the original e-mail updates, printed here exactly as Viehweg wrote them on the dates listed. But sprinkled throughout the narrative are flashbacks and anecdotes revealing, sometimes hilariously, sometimes tenderly, Lana’s strengths, character, and unique abilities as a mother devoted to raising nine children.  It’s a story about cancer, but also a story about husbands, wives, and families, and the love and devotion that holds them together.  And every word is true. To Lana, service and sacrifice came as naturally as selfishness and greed come to most people. That was her gift, and the author hopes readers will get a glimpse of it in these pages.  An author’s loving tribute to one tough mother, who bore his nine children, nurtured them, loved them, and unknowingly prepared them for her own demise, Mom Interrupted will grip you, touch you, and inspire you.

A heart wrenching chronicle of a young family struggling through their ordeal, Mom Interrupted: A Young Family Faces Cancer will resonate with anyone who cares about the challenges facing families today.

Read an excerpt from the book (download excerpt here).

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