within hours and days, you're suddenly having to make these decisions that are just surreal.

Yeah, making funeral arrangements for a gal you thought you would be planning a wedding for.

Yeah. It's, it is staggering.

Hi, everyone. You are about to hear a deeply personal conversation with a dear friend of

mine who is working her way through grief and has written a really powerful book about it.

But before we get to that, I have another booknote to share with you. If you haven't picked up on it yet,

I am a reader. I read constantly. And I'm a reader. I read constantly, and I know a lot of you do as well,

and I love hearing from you. So we decided to start a bulwark book club. About once a month,

I'll pick a book, we'll have a few weeks to read it and then we'll talk about

it sometimes we'll have the author on sometimes we may dig in with another guest or two

we may even feature the occasional movie as we did the other week with a man for all seasons

the main thing is this is going to be interactive. I'm excited to hear from you

and the rest of the bulwark community. So my first pick, it is a new book called If I Don't Return,

a father's wartime journal. You may know the wonderful author, my bulwark colleague, Lieutenant General Mark Hurtling.

He started writing years ago, never imagining it would become a book. The writing began with letters

to his young sons as he faced one of the biggest challenges of his military career.

So please pick up if I don't return at the library or at your

favorite bookseller and then start telling us what you think, any thoughts, questions.

We want to hear all of it. You can do that in the comments section of the Mona Charon

Book Club announcement on Substack. It's linked in the show notes

for today's show and also pinned to the Mona Charon show page on the bulwark.com. Please get your

comments in by Friday, June 5th. I may read some during our discussion with Mark. That will be a

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