Welcome to Nobody Told Me. I'm Laura Owens. And I'm Jan Black. We feel we can say with certainty that you're going to love our guest on this episode, Marianne O'Hara.

As a mother-daughter duo, we were gripped by her new book, which is a memoir of her daughter

Caitlin's life and death after a lifelong battle with cystic fibrosis. The book is called Little

Matches, a memoir of grief and light. In it, Marianne navigates her own existence during and after

an adulthood dedicated to Caitlin's care and chronicles what comes next when the worst finally happens.

Marianne, we thank you so very much for joining us. Well, thank you. It's very special to be here

with a mother-daughter duo because my mother-daughter duo continues.

You also lost your own mother last year, and we wanted to touch on that as well.

But first, tell us about your daughter, Caitlin.

Ah, Caitlin. She was a wonderful person and inspired a lot of people in her short lifetime

in the way that a lot of people who live

with lifelong illness do. They are older than their years usually and they have to confront

issues of mortality long before other people do. So she had kind of a lifelong wisdom and sass and

fire and I wanted to put all that into the book.

I wanted to record who she was. We always think we're going to have more time.

Even with her, we thought we would have more time. And when we lost her so suddenly and so horribly,

it was so important to me once I decided to write a book to really record who she had been

because she inspired so many people.

And I wanted to include her own writing in the book, which I did.

And I've just been loving how I've been hearing from strangers who say that the book has inspired them,

that they've stayed up all night

reading it, that they didn't expect to feel so comforted by it.

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