There is a garden at St. Joseph Hospital in Orange, California — a quiet loop connected to the old convent — where nurses and leaders alike have walked for decades.
On a lunch break. Between hard shifts. Before a difficult decision.
I think about those people when I write this book.
The ones in the middle of patient care, carrying a decision they don’t want to make, or trying to hold a team together when everything is moving too fast.
Maybe you’re one of them.
I want this book to steady your day.
Not fix it. Not optimize it. Just — steady it.
Give you ten minutes with Sister Jayne or Sister Diane, and send you back to your work a little more settled than before.
Soon, that physical presence will be gone.
The Sisters who shaped that place are aging.
The daily proximity that once held the culture — the sound of a chair pulling close, the unhurried attention, the way Diane could hold a room through silence — is becoming a memory.
Most leaders who read this book won’t ever sit in Sister Kit’s office, papers stacked across her desk, held in her complete, undistracted presence.
They won’t feel Jayne’s quiet strength, or sense that Diane already knows what hasn’t been said yet.
But they may recognize something in themselves they haven’t had words for before.
That’s what I’m trying to carry forward.
Not as biography. Not as theology.
As practice. As something a leader can pick up on a Tuesday morning before a hard meeting.
This book succeeds when a nurse manager reads about Sister Diane holding silence in a boardroom and thinks: I’ve done that. I didn’t know that was leadership.
When someone who has never walked that garden reads this book and feels like they have.
At a broader level, this is my attempt to carry forward something that’s slowly being lost.
Not just the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange — but the kind of leadership they embodied: steady, faithful, unglamorous, and irreplaceable.
If this book does its work, that way of leading doesn’t disappear when the last Sister leaves the hall.
It keeps going.
Stay close,
