Chasing Chaos, Finding Home: A Collection of Memories, Poems and Stories

There’s a stuffed banana in this book. There’s also a father’s last breath, two weeks after his cancer diagnosis. Somehow, both belong to the same story. Jenn Kassan was three years old when her mother, Pam, died of cancer. She didn’t understand death—she only understood that she couldn’t go trick-or-treating. Fifty years later, she’s still making sense of what that loss built inside her: a career collecting cancer data, a marriage tested by infertility and chronic pain, two daughters who inherited her chaos and her fight, and a stepmother she spent decades learning to forgive. Chasing Chaos, Finding Home doesn’t move in a straight line. It moves the way memory does—in loops, fragments, and poems that arrived before the prose did. Funny in the places you don’t expect. Devastating in the places you do. But somewhere along the way, Jenn realized she wasn’t only telling her own story. She was telling her mother’s. Pamela Rose Ordell Decker lived only twenty-seven years. She never got to tell her daughter who she was or to know the woman she would become. What remained were photographs, fragments of memory, stories carried by other people—and a daughter who kept looking for her. This book cannot give Pam back the years she lost. But it can preserve the proof that she was here. That she mattered. And maybe the only way to finish her mother’s story was for Jenn to finally understand her own. Read it start to finish, or follow whichever thread calls to you first: grief, motherhood, chaos, or love in all its imperfect forms. There is no wrong way to read this book. There was no wrong way to survive what it took to write it.