When Blood is Gone: A Memoir of Time, Place, and Family

Whether they are beloved or despised, adored or ignored, our families indelibly make a mark on who we are. Director and screenwriter Terrell Tannen's life story, When Blood is Gone: A Memoir of Time, Place, and Family, is a star-studded, action-packed family drama. From venturing to a remote Mexican peninsula to meet storied director and actor John Huston to surviving one of America's worst train crashes to hanging out with guitar legend Link Wray as a teenager, Tannen's story is full of almost unbelievable encounters except they're all true.

But the greatest adventure in Tannen's memoir is family life and death. The son of an intelligence officer and a military nurse, Tannen and his older brother Bob spent their summers at Azalea s Acres, their Cofield grandparents farm in Monroe, Georgia. They also lived in an Indiana college town, desert New Mexico, the government employee communities of Washington, DC, and post-war Naples, Italy. While on a car trip through Italy, Tannen's father suffered a heart attack and passed away in his son's arms.

This event initiated what would become, for Tannen, a strange, close association with death, culminating in the eerily similar death of his brother decades later, and serving as a counterpoint to the challenges of assisting his aged mother through the last few months of her life.