Overview

 Before the Last Heartbeat - is a memoir that begins with an ordinary, close-knit family spiraling into the extraordinary when two young siblings die due to an invisible genetic condition. This happened before science even had a name for it, and before my own reckoning as both a survivor and a carrier of the same gene. 

 This memoir is a story of love, loss, and resilience, an intimate medical mystery with life-or-death stakes. Like Lawrence Ingrassia’s A Fatal Inheritance, it uncovers how lethal genetic secrets can pass silently through generations. It also draws on the systemic failures and diagnostic blind spots explored in Meghan O’Rourke’s The Invisible Kingdomand resonates with Emily Wells’ A Matter of Appearance, a raw and lyrical portrait of misdiagnosis, pain, and the fight to be believed. 

 One phone call at 11:30 p.m. shattered us forever. My healthy, athletic 20-year-old brother had “passed peacefully in his sleep”. That impossible phrase became the mystery my family carried for years, one that pushed us through heartbreak, implausibility and ultimately into a fight reshaping our lives. This isn’t just a story of genes and medicine, it’s a story of siblings and parents, of family around the dinner table interrupted by the silence of sudden death, of a mother who refused to give up when the doctors did. Every fainting spell was dismissed as “anxiety.” Doctors called me dramatic, even before my brother and sister died, but when reality hit, it felt like I was a ticking time bomb. And every time my heart skipped, I wondered if I’d be next. 

 That disconnect between what we lived through and what the experts believed is the heartbeat of this book.

What makes Before the Last Heartbeat unique is that it goes beyond loss to reveal what came next; the relentless fight against medical arrogance and misdiagnoses, the creation of a foundation to help families like ours, and the discoveries that reshaped the field of cardiac genetics. As the next generation faced unexpected test results, our family’s devastation transforms into a legacy of action and change.

 Narrated with the intimacy of character-driven storytelling, this memoir introduces readers to my brother Jack and my sister Sharon who readers will fall in love with before sudden death interrupts their lives, and to my mother Doris, the hero who never stopped fighting for her children. It brings readers directly into the family, showing the everyday love, humor, and resilience that made the losses so devastating and the fight for answers so urgent. 

 This blend of emotional resonance and medical intrigue makes the book appealing not only to memoir readers, but also to health workers, the medical community, and families navigating their own genetic legacies.

My siblings’ short lives underscore the urgency of this story. Hidden conditions that strike without warning still lurk in families around the world. By turning grief into advocacy, Before the Last Heartbeatbecomes not only a record of heartbreak but a call to action