When their only child was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis (CF) at the age of two, Maryanne O’Hara and her husband were told that Caitlin could live a long life or die in a matter of months. Thirty-one years later, following an excruciating, two-year wait on the transplant list and a last-minute race to locate a pair of healthy lungs, a story that attracted nationwide attention, Caitlin lost her battle with this pernicious disease. Little Matches is Maryanne’s intimate recounting of Caitlin’s journey and her own, weaving a rich narrative of memories with text messages, emails, journal entries and even drawings. O’Hara, former fiction editor of Ploughshares, is a Reiki master certified by the University of Vermont’s Larner College of Medicine as an end-of-life doula so that she might better speak to the state of end-of-life care in our culture.