The Things That Need Doing

“You keep fighting, okay?” I whispered. “We’re in this together. You and me. You’re not alone. You hear me? You are not alone.”

5:38 p.m. It was the precise moment Sean Manning was born and the time each year that his mother wished him happy birthday. But just before he turned twenty-seven, their tradition collapsed. A heart attack landed his mom in the hospital and uprooted Manning from his life in New York. What followed was a testament to a family’s indestructible bond—a life-changing odyssey that broke a boy and made a man—captured here in Manning’s indelible memoir.

SEAN MANNING is the editor of the nonfiction anthologies Rock and Roll Cage
Match, The Show I’ll Never Forget, Top of the Order, and Bound to Last. He lives in
New York.