These Precious Conditions

Ann Conn had spent her career studying the brain. Nothing she knew could prepare her for what happened to her own family.

When severe psychiatric illness struck both of her sons, Ann became simultaneously doctor and mother—tracking symptoms, searching for treatments, navigating a fragmented medical system, and desperately trying to keep her sons Austin and Colin alive. But the knowledge that had made her an expert could not tell her how to survive.

In These Precious Conditions, Conn brings together the seemingly irreconcilable selves left standing in the aftermath: grieving mother and neurologist, scientist and spiritual seeker, physician and patient, woman shattered by loss and woman still capable of experiencing beauty, love, and joy. Moving between intimate family history, the science of the brain, psychiatric illness, Buddhism and contemplative practice, pilgrimage, medicine, motherhood, and the physical reality of grief, Conn searches not for a tidy explanation of suffering but for a way to live alongside what cannot be changed.

Her journey carries her from New Orleans to sacred landscapes and spiritual traditions around the world, while continually returning to the two sons whose lives reshaped her own.

Unflinching yet ultimately life-affirming, These Precious Conditions is not a story about "getting over" unimaginable loss. It is an inquiry into what human beings can carry, how love persists beyond death, and how a broken life invariably also offers new meaning.