Three months after Sara's death, Shane Yerkes packs a converted truck, points it west, and drives his ten-year-old son out of the South Carolina Lowcountry. Four years of cancer cost them the woman at the center of their family. The road, he hopes, can give them somewhere to put the grief. Across nearly a month and dozens of states-from Old Sheldon Church to the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone's bison herds to the South Dakota plains-Shane tells Conor the full story of his mother. How she argued an idea down to its bones and made every room she entered her own. How she loved her boy with a fierceness that shaped him before he could remember it. How she fought for four years and refused, to the end, to let cancer define her. On the Healing Road is the story of a father's struggle to accept widowhood and a son's first encounter with loss.

Honest and plainspoken with an undercurrent of hope, it traces the slow turning of a wound into a scar.