Saving lives in emergency medicine is a daunting and challenging life's calling. For decades, Chavez trained himself to compartmentalize — to stay steady in the chaos of the ER, to make split-second decisions with lives on the line, and to move on to the next patient.

None of that prepared him for the loss of his wife, Alise.

After her death — and facing the decline of his mother — he returned to the Pino Trail in the Sandia Mountains outside Albuquerque, the landscape of his childhood. Walking the trail became a form of reckoning: with grief, with memory, with the question of what it means to heal when the person you most want to save is yourself.

What emerged from those walks was this book. Not a book about how grief ends — he would be the first to say it doesn't — but a book about what you do in the middle of it. How you keep walking. How the landscape receives you when you have nothing to offer it but your presence and your loss.

The title comes from his mother. She believed, with quiet conviction, that a life should be lived so fully and so generously that even an angel couldn't improve on it. It was advice she gave him. It was advice he carried on the trail, and into the writing, and through the harder grief of losing her as well.

With raw honesty and heartfelt emotion, this is a memoir about resilience, the power of nature to heal, and the invisible hands that guide us through our darkest times.