Some lives are too big for one book. This is the lastchapter of one that took five.In My Hard Life Lived Well, Volume 5, MariaMary Banfi Kardos closes out her remarkable memoir from acommunist farm village in Slovenia, through a refugee camp in Austria, to ahard-won American life built with her husband, Karl, and their five children inWilloughby Hills, Ohio.This final volume picks up in 1970, as a new baby daughterarrives and reawakens a family already stretched thin by teenage daughters,growing sons, and the relentless work of building something from nothing. Maryand Karl finally have the means and the courage to plan the trip of alifetime: a return to the Europe they fled, and the family they left behind inSlovenia and Yugoslavia decades earlier.But 1972 has one more test in store. Just as the familyreaches its hard-earned good life, an unexpected and shocking eventchanges everything Mary thought she knew about her future.Told with unflinching honesty and deep faith, and co-writtenin her final years with her son after his own life-altering stroke, this volumeis both a homecoming and a reckoning a mother's last gift to the children andgrandchildren who carry her story forward.If you've followed Mary's journey from Volume 1, this is theending she earned. If you're meeting her for the first time, prepare to bemoved.Continue the journey read Volume 5 today.
