Never Lose Sight

In 2016, five-year-old Kai was diagnosed with choroideremia. The same disease had taken his great-grandfather’s sight generations earlier, back when doctors had no name for it and called it something else entirely. It meant Kai’s world would narrow year by year, the way his great-grandfather once described his own: like looking through a keyhole, until even that closed.Angela Ricketts had spent her life outrunning grief, not sitting still with it. But this news reached backward, into a family history of silence and quiet endurance, and forward, into a future she couldn’t control. Within eighteen months she buried her grandmother and then her father, a man who had spent more than ten years as a Franciscan monk before becoming a nurse and a potter, the one who taught her, at his wheel, to be still and know. Grief split her open. So she did the one thing that had ever steadied her: she went back to the clay.As a girl, Angela had pressed worry stones into shape at her father’s wheel, in his basement, at his art shows, for a quarter apiece. Decades later, alone in her garage at two in the morning, she pressed a hole through the center of a small stone. A place to put a thumb. A place to be still.NEVER LOSE SIGHT follows Angela through the waiting rooms and the funerals, the marriage strained thin and the children raised in the middle of it, as she learns to hold her son’s fading sight and her own unraveling faith in the same two hands. It is a reckoning with what it means to see clearly, not with the eyes, but with whatever is left when the eyes go. And it is the origin story of Sight Stones, the small clay reminders now carried by thousands of people trying to hold on to what matters most.With a foreword by John O’Leary.Grounded in faith, unflinching about grief, and quietly insistent on hope, this is a memoir for anyone who has had to keep going without being able to see what’s ahead.