Finish This Before You Die: A Memoir

By Tyler Dittenbir

At twenty, Tyler Dittenbir was pulled out of college and told to get to the emergency room. A CT scan had revealed a tear in his aorta. Most patients don't survive the first twenty-four hours. He had been living with the injury for weeks.

What followed was emergency open-heart surgery - and then, three years later, a second one.

Finish This Before You Die is a memoir about survival and everything that comes after it. It moves through the years between two open-heart surgeries and beyond: recovery, a photography program in Paris, the slow suffocation of factory work, a second surgery during COVID, watching his mother go through the same operation from the other side of the bed, and finally, a decision about what kind of life is still possible.

This is not a story about gratitude or transformation. It is about the quiet weight of living in a body that has already failed you once - the anxiety that never fully leaves, the identity that fractures, the gap between the life you imagined and the one you are actually living.

Precise, restrained, and deeply honest, Finish This Before You Die is a book for anyone who has ever had to reckon with the fact that survival is not the same thing as living.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GTL6JM6S
• ISBN13: 9798251840599
• Release Date: March 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 182 Pages
• Weight: 0.48 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.5" x 8.5"