When Every Breath Becomes a Prayer

The day she returns from her mother's funeral, Georgina discovers her husband Colin's affair. A remote Englishman, he is unsympathetic to the fact that Georgina’s world has been capsized by the death of both her parents and her daughter, Kate’s, suicidal depression.

Already down on her hands and knees, fighting for her child’s life, Colin’s affair lands Georgina face down in the mud. As Kate grows sicker and nothing helps, Georgina descends into a nightmare world where all her assumptions about reality are exploded as she turns for help to an intuitive in Minnesota, a Peruvian archangel channel, an Irish mystic and her own dreams.

Georgina is mystical, Kate is practical. Where Georgina rushes in guided by intuition, Kate thinks things through, observing and sensing their pulse. Only love for her mother keeps Kate from taking her own life, when all she wants, is to beg for death, to end the unbearable pain.

Four women support them on their journey. It is articulate hardboiled Emma, an obituary writer for The Times, who perpetually goads Georgina in the role of side kick and commentator. The wisdom of the crone is offered by Georgina's 80 year old friend Selma. Selma is the daughter of a black share cropper raised in the South before the Civil Rights Act. When Georgina says "If Kate dies, I will die. Did you know love can kill?" Selma tells her "pull up your socks girl, you got to pull up your socks and help your child.” And it is Carrie, the etherial horse therapist, who, when fear grips Georgina by the throat, stealing her voice, reminds her, "worrying is like praying for what you don't want.” And then, there is Julia, Georgina's younger sister. It is Julia who has always sweetened Georgina's life. But it is Julia, and not Kate, who will be sacrificed to death before the story ends.