Palmetto Publishing to Release Frank J. Brescia, MD's Meditation on Death, Love and Faith After Fifty Years of Treating Cancer

Coming from Palmetto Publishing on October 6, 2026, An Ordinary Day Just Shorter collects a medical oncologist's reflections on death, faith and love across five decades of practice, war and personal loss.

CHARLESTON, S.C., Oct. 14, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Palmetto Publishing will release An Ordinary Day Just Shorter, a meditation on death, love and faith by Frank J. Brescia, MD, a medical oncologist with more than fifty years in practice. The book began with a question the author could not answer. It will be available October 6, 2026, through major online retailers.

The first chapter opens in late summer 2023, during a run of three family weddings held two weeks apart. Minutes before Brescia was to walk his daughter down the aisle, word arrived that his stepdaughter's husband of two weeks had died suddenly in Denver at age 31. The wedding went forward. The father of the bride gave his speech. At the funeral that followed, the young widow asked Brescia why and how to go on another day. He had spent his career in rooms where that question is asked, and he had no answer for her.

From there the narrative moves between the clinic and the kitchen table. Brescia writes about patients near the end asking him to confirm that nothing is left in his little black bag, about watching a house-call doctor attend his dying great-grandmother when he was four, about a Bronx childhood of garlic and homemade red wine, and about serving as a physician with an infantry unit in Quang Tri. He also writes about June 2013, when his wife, Jane, died of the disease he has spent his life treating. Trained in philosophy at Fordham as well as in medicine, he presses at what is actually lost in death and whether a good death exists. The title comes from the Samuel Beckett line that serves as the book's epigraph: "The day you die is just any other day, only shorter."

Brescia writes, "The premise of my examination is that if I, the physician, remain open to honest self-reflection and the constant cries of my patients in distress, it will offer the opportunity for me to become not only a better physician, but a better human being, a better person to my family as well."

The book is written for adult readers drawn to physician memoirs and to the literature of mortality, including Atul Gawande's Being Mortal, Paul Kalanithi's When Breath Becomes Air and Sherwin Nuland's How We Die. It arrives as end-of-life care, hospice access and how doctors talk with patients about prognosis remain steady subjects of public discussion in the United States. Brescia does not offer consolations he does not believe, and he is direct about his own doubts and failings. His position is that the asking matters even when the answers do not come.

An Ordinary Day Just Shorter will be available for purchase online at Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com. For more information about the author, please visit his social media platforms.

About the Author: Frank J. Brescia, MD has spent more than fifty years in medical oncology, most of it caring for women with breast cancer, which is to say he has spent more than fifty years in rooms where the news is often hard. He was raised in an Italian American home in the northeast Bronx, the oldest grandchild on both sides of the family, in a house where Friday nights meant his grandmother Rose's cooking and homemade red wine brought up from barrels in the cellar. Rejected three years running by the Catholic high school he wanted, he went on to Fordham University and Rutgers Medical School, then trained as a fellow in medical oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.

In his late twenties he was sent to Vietnam, where he served as a physician and captain with an infantry unit, the 1st/5th Cavalry, in Quang Tri and saw death that owed nothing to disease. He returned home, built a practice, raised six children, and later took a master's degree in philosophy from Fordham in 1987, a pairing of vocations that gave him the vocabulary for questions medicine alone could not settle. He has been on the staff of Emory University Medical School and is currently a Professor of Medicine at the Medical University of South Carolina.

When his wife, Jane, died of metastatic breast cancer in June 2013, the disease he treated professionally became the one that emptied his house. Notes he later drafted for a 2020 conference paper on spirituality in medicine, for a meeting in Japan that the pandemic canceled, led first to the memoir As Good As It Gets: The Evolving Thoughts of a Deathwatcher (2024) and then to An Ordinary Day Just Shorter. He married Christie McElroy, gaining two stepdaughters, and they live in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina.

About the Book:

Title: An Ordinary Day Just Shorter: A Meditation of a DeathWatcher
Author: Frank J. Brescia, MD, MA, FACP

Publisher: Palmetto Publishing
Publication date: October 6, 2026
ISBN-13: 9798318850462, 9798318842672, 9798318850479
Available for interviews: Author, Frank J. Brescia, MD

SOURCE Palmetto Publishing