The Last Pilgrimage: My Mother's Life and Our Journey to Saying Goodbye [Paperback]

Linda Daly had a seemingly charmed life: her mother Nancy was married to the head of Warner Bros, and her parents were one of the most influential and prominent couples in Los Angeles. Even their divorce couldn't test the bond between mother and daughter, and their family grew: her mother married Dick Riordan, mayor of L.A.; her father married songwriter Carole Bayer Sager. The extended family used their combined resources to help a number of cultural and philanthropic concerns across the country until they encountered the one thing they could not overcome: Nancy's diagnosis of stage four pancreatic cancer.



So mother and daughter teamed up to begin a search for a miracle cure—a roller–coaster ride through the rigors of western medicine, the surgeries and chemotherapies, and the untested boundaries of alternative medicine. What Linda learned on their final pilgrimage together would change her forever and speaks to the issues faced by many adult sons and daughters today: how to help those who gave you life face the end of their own.



Ultimately, The Last Pilgrimage is Linda's love letter to her mother, proof that the end of life can offer a peaceful and comforting farewell.Praise for The Last Pilgrimage

This book is two stories, a child's and a dying parent's, and each of us has both of those stories in us too, whether we tell them in a book for the world to read or tell them for ourselves alone, around the family table, as our turn comes to care for the dying and then, eventually, to be among them. —Patt Morrison, The Los Angeles Times

The Last Pilgrimage is a gorgeous love story and spiritual travelogue wrapped in a wonderfully written, funny, and fantastic memoir. It is the best kind of biography; like life, reality bites and blossoms on every plÓ