FCC's Mary Harper has a friend who had a dramatic and moving story she wanted to share, a story about her near-death experience and her healing after an aneurysm.   When she learned that her friend's book was not proceeding well, she signed on as editor/provocateur. After a year of e-mail exchanges and discussions, plus time for production, she and Mary Jo Rapini, today a psychotherapist at Methodist Hospital in Houston, published the book Is God Pink?  Dying to Heal.

 Mary Harper (left) and Mary Jo Rapini at Barnes & Noble

Pink was a color in a room of brilliant white light where Mary Jo experienced peace and love and "where I knew I was in this place with my Creator."

The two Marys have had book signings in Lubbock, where Rapini lived when she fell ill, and at the Barnes & Noble bookstore on Holcomb in Houston .  The 95-page paperback is available at Amazon.com.

Targeting people with serious illness, the author and editor made the book a quick read.  It includes not only Mary Jo's personal story but also the experiences of cancer patients in the support group she led in Lubbock.  "If I hadn't worked with cancer patients," she writes, "I would not have been as effective at healing my heart and soul after [my] surgery."

In that section of the book she lists lessons that children with cancer taught her, three of which are:

"1.  …you have only today, so enjoy it (you can watch Winnie the Pooh and get your chemotherapy at the same time).

2. Let go and trust in something bigger than yourself.

3.  When you are afraid, go ahead and say it.  People who love you are probably scared, too, and we can all comfort each other."

Mary Harper's experience with book publishing does not end here.  Her neighbor, a fiction writer, just advised her that she was giving a character in her next book a benign tumor on a fibula, inspired by the black cast Mary's been living with of late.

Mary is planning to write a book as well.  It will describe the challenges her parents, both of them blind, faced in raising four children.