Synopsis

Two days before he would die from a cardiac arrest during a routine medical procedure and be resuscitated after forty minutes of CPR, Fredrick Swan wrote a skeptical prayer in a journal.  Discouraged and depressed he asked the Universe that he might wake from his upcoming procedure a “changed man, a man with a differing view” of his life.   Ten months later the same physician that had resuscitated the author was summoned to perform life-saving surgery on Swan’s wife.

A memoir about life on both sides of an event labeled by some medical staff as a “miracle”, Parentheses provides a rare and sensitive glimpse into the heart and the mind of a man as he searches through his troubled and abusive childhood, his quest as an adult to find a birth parent, his life as a husband threated with the loss of his wife, his questions about the existence of God and the physical and psychological debris left from a catastrophic event.

Parentheses is a story of the resiliency of the human spirit.  It takes a spirited path that will resonate with readers who, despite the enormous losses and challenges we all eventually encounter, continue to hope and who continue to aspire to use to the fullest any day and any potential they are given.

The memoir’s author, Fredrick Swan, is an artist and the publisher of an on-line magazine.