Nicholas John Steel Traina
May 1, 1978 - September 20, 1997

                   About this Book
                   "This is the story of an extraordinary boy with a brilliant mind, a heart of
                   gold, and a tortured soul. It is the story of an illness, a fight to live, and a
                   race against death."

                   From the day he was born, Nick Traina was his mother's joy. By nineteen,
                   he was dead. This is Danielle Steel's powerful personal story of the son she
                   lost and the lessons she learned during his courageous battle against
                   darkness. Sharing tender, painful memories and Nick's remarkable journals,
                   Steel brings us a haunting duet between a singular young man and the
                   mother who loved him--and a harrowing portrait of a masked killer called
                   manic depression, which afflicts between two and three million Americans.

                   Nick rocketed through life like a shooting star. Signs of his illness were
                   subtle, often paradoxical. He spoke in full sentences at age one. He was a
                   brilliant, charming child who never slept. And at first, even his mother
                   explained away his quicksilver moods. Nick always marched to a different
                   drummer. His gift for writing was extraordinary, his musical talent promised
                   a golden future. But by the time he entered junior high, Danielle Steel saw
                   her beloved son hurtling toward disaster and tried desperately to get Nick
                   the help he needed--the opening salvos of what would become a ferocious
                   pitched battle for his life.

                   Even as he struggled, Nick's charisma and accomplishments remained
                   undimmed. He bared his soul in his journal with uncanny insight, in searing
                   prose, poetry, and song. When he was finally diagnosed and treated, it
                   bought time, but too little. In the end, perhaps nothing could have saved him
                   from the insidious disease that had shadowed him from his earliest years.

                   At once a loving legacy and an unsparing depiction of a devastating illness,
                   Danielle Steel's tribute to her lost son is a gift of life, hope, healing, and
                   understanding to us all.

                   The Nick Traina Foundation has been established to benefit mental health,
                   music, and child-related causes, and other charitable organizations for
                   assorted causes. All of the author's proceeds and agent's fees from this
                   book will go to the foundation, which will also receive direct proceeds from
                   the publisher for all copies sold.
 

                   Excerpt
                   Prologue

                   This will not be an easy book to write, but there is much to say, in my own
                   words, and my son's. And as hard as it may be to write, it's worth doing, if
                   it helps someone.

                   It is hard to encapsulate a being, a very special being, a soul, a smile, a boy,
                   a huge talent, an enormous heart, a child, a man, in however many pages.
                   Yet I must try, for him, for myself, for you. And I hope that as I do, you will
                   come to understand who he was, and what he meant to all those who knew
                   him.

                   This is the story of an extraordinary boy, with a brilliant mind, a heart of
                   gold, and a tortured soul. It is the story of an illness, a fight to live, and a
                   race against death. It is early days for me yet, as I write this. He has been
                   gone a short time. My heart still aches. The days seem endless. I still cry at
                   the sound of his name. I wander into his room and can still smell his familiar
                   smell. His words still echo in my ears. He was alive only days, weeks ago . .
                   . so little time, and yet he is gone. It is still impossible to absorb or
                   understand. Harder still to accept. I look at his photographs, and cannot
                   imagine that all that life and love and energy has vanished. That funny,
                   handsome face, that brilliant smile, the heart I knew better than my own, the
                   best friend he became to me, can they truly be gone? Do they live only in
                   memory? Even now, it remains beyond my comprehension, and is
                   sometimes beyond bearing. How did it all happen? How did we lose him?
                   How could we have tried so hard, and cared so much, and loved him so
                   enormously, and still have lost him? If love alone could have kept him alive,
                   he would have lived to be three hundred years old. But sometimes, even
                   loving with all your heart and soul and all your mind and will just doesn't do
                   it. Sadly, it didn't do it for Nick.

                   If I had three wishes, one would be that he had never suffered from mental
                   illness, the other would be of course that he were alive today, but the third
                   would be that someone had warned me, at some point, that his
                   illness--manic depression--could kill him. Perhaps they did. Perhaps they
                   told me in some subtle way. Maybe the inference was there, and I didn't
                   want to hear it. But I listened carefully to everything that was said to me
                   over the years, I examined every nuance, and to the best of my knowledge
                   and abilities, heeded every warning. My recollection is that no one told me.
                   Certainly not clearly. And it was a piece of information that I desperately
                   needed. I'm not sure we would have done things any differently, but at least
                   I would have known, been warned, of what the worst case could be.

                   His illness killed him as surely as if it had been a cancer. I wish I had known
                   that, that I had been warned how great the risk was. Perhaps then I would
                   have been better prepared for what came later. I'm not sure that in the
                   minds of the public it is clear that bipolar disease, manic depression as it's
                   more commonly called, is potentially fatal. Not always certainly, but in far
                   too many cases. Suicide and accidents appear to be the greatest cause of
                   death for manic-depressives. Neither are uncommon. If I had been told that
                   he had cancer of a major organ, I would have known with certainty how
                   great the risk was. I might have understood how short his life could be, how
                   tragic the implication. I'm sure I would have fought just as hard, just as long,
                   just as ingeniously, but I would have been better prepared for what came
                   later. The defeat might not have been quite as startling or as stunning, though
                   it would surely have been just as devastating.

                   The purpose of this book is to pay tribute to him, and to what he
                   accomplished in his short life. Nick was an extraordinary human being, with
                   joy and wisdom, and remarkably profound and astute perceptions about
                   himself and others. He faced life with courage and panache and passion and
                   humor. He did everything "more" and better and harder. He loved harder
                   and more, he laughed a lot, and made us laugh, and cry, and try so hard to
                   save him. No one who met him was left unimpressed or unaffected. You
                   couldn't meet him and not give a damn. He made you care and feel and
                   want to be as big as he was. He was very big. The biggest.

                   I have written this book to honor and remember him. But there is yet
                   another purpose in writing this book. I want to share the story, and the pain,
                   the courage, the love, and what I learned in living through it. I want Nick's
                   life to be not only a tender memory for us, but a gift to others. There is
                   much to learn here, not only about one life, but about a disease that afflicts
                   between two and three million Americans, one third of whom, it is believed,
                   die from it, possibly as many as two thirds. That is a terrifying statistic. The
                   statistics are somewhat "soft" on the issue of fatalities, because often death
                   is attributed to other things, for instance "accidental overdose" rather than
                   suicide, which is determined by the actual amount of fatal substances
                   ingested, rather than by clear motive.

                   It is debatable as to whether or not those who have died could have been
                   saved, or if those who will die can be. But what of those who will live, and
                   have lived, and are still living? How do we help them? What can we do?
                   Sadly, no one, and certainly not I, has the magic answers to solve the
                   problem. There are different options, different solutions, a variety of ways of
                   coping. But first, you have to see the problem. You have to understand
                   what you're dealing with, to accept that what you're dealing with is the
                   equivalent of not just a bellyache, but liver cancer. You have to know that
                   what you're facing is serious, important, dangerous, and potentially fatal.

                   Somewhere out there, in apartments, and homes, and hospitals, in ordinary
                   jobs and lives, and not just psychiatric wards, are people coping with a
                   terrible struggle within them. And alongside them are the people who know
                   and love them. I would like to reach out here, and to offer hope and the
                   realities we lived with. I want to make a difference. My hope is that
                   someone will be able to use what we learned, and save a life with it. Maybe
                   you can make a difference, even if I couldn't. If it is true that one third of
                   manic-depressives die of this disease, and its related burdens, then two
                   thirds will live. Two thirds can be helped, and can live a useful existence.
                   And if possible, I would like Nick's story, and Nick's life, to help them, to
                   serve them, perhaps to learn from our mistakes, and our victories.

                   The greatest lessons I learned were of courage, and love, energy, ingenuity,
                   and persistence. We never gave up, never turned away, never turned on
                   him, never let him go, until he let us go, because he couldn't fight the fight
                   any longer. We not only gave him CPR when he attempted suicide, but we
                   tried to keep his soul alive in every way we could, so that he could keep
                   fighting the fight along with us. And the real victory for him, and for us, was
                   that we gave him a quality of life he might otherwise never have had. He
                   was able to pursue a career he loved, in music. He saw victories that few
                   people do, at twice his age, or who live a great deal longer. He knew the
                   joy and excitement of success, and also knew better than most the price he
                   paid for it. He had friends, a life, a family, a career, he had fun and
                   happiness and sorrow. He moved through the last few years of his life with
                   surprising grace, despite the handicaps he was born with. And we were
                   incredibly proud of him, as a man, a musician, and a human being. He was a
                   talented, brilliant young man with a disease. But the disease did not stop him
                   from being who he was, or us from loving him as he was. In retrospect, I
                   think it was one of the best gifts we gave him. Acceptance of who he was,
                   and unconditional love. In our eyes at least, his illness was only one facet of
                   him, not the whole of him.

                   There is no denying that it is a hard, hard road, loving someone with bipolar
                   disease. There are times when you want to scream, days when you think
                   you can't do it anymore, weeks when you know you haven't made a
                   difference and only wish you could, moments when you want to turn your
                   back on it. It is their problem, not yours, and yet it becomes yours if you
                   love the person suffering from it. You have no choice. You must stand by
                   them. You are trapped, as surely as the patient is. And you will hate that
                   trap at times, hate what it does to your life, your days, your own sanity. But
                   hate it or not, you are there, and whatever it takes, you have to make the
                   best of it.

                   I can only tell you what we did, what we tried, what worked, and what
                   failed. You can learn from what we tried to accomplish, and develop better
                   avenues that work for you. We tried a lot of things, and flew by the seat of
                   our pants some of the time. There are no rule books, no manuals, no
                   instruction sheets, no norms. You just have to feel your way along in the
                   dark and do the best you can. You can't do more than that. And if you're
                   very lucky, what you're doing works. If you're not, it won't, and then you
                   try something else. You try anything and everything you can until the very
                   end, and then all you have is knowing how hard you tried. Nick knew. He
                   knew how hard we tried for him, and he tried too. We respected each other
                   so much for it. We loved each other incredibly because we had been
                   through so much together, and we cared so much. He and I were very
                   much alike actually, more than we realized for many years. He said it in the
                   end. He made me laugh. He made me smile. He was not only my son, but
                   my best friend. And I am doing this for him, to honor him, and to help those
                   who need to know what we learned, what we did, what we should have
                   done, and shouldn't have done. And if it helps someone then it is worth
                   reliving it all, and sharing his joys and his agonies with you. I am not doing it
                   to expose him, or myself, but to help you.

                   Would I do it all again? Yes. In a minute. I wouldn't give away these
                   nineteen years for anything in the world. I wouldn't give up the pain or the
                   torment or the sheer frustration, or the occasional misery of it, because there
                   was so much joy and happiness that went with it. There was nothing better
                   in life than knowing that things were going well for him. I would not have
                   missed a single instant with him. He taught me more about love and joy and
                   courage and the love of life and wonderful outrageousness than anything or
                   anyone else in my life ever will. He gave me the gifts of love and
                   compassion and understanding and acceptance and tolerance and patience,
                   wrapped in laughter, straight from his heart. And now I share these gifts
                   with you.

                   Love is meant to be shared, and pain is meant to be soothed. If I can share
                   your pain, and soothe it with the love Nick shared with all of us, then his life
                   will be yet one more gift, not only to me and his family this time, but to you.

                   It was Nick who made it all worthwhile, and worth fighting for. He did it for
                   us, and for himself, and we for him. It was a dance of love from beginning to
                   end. His was a life worth living, whatever the handicaps and challenges. I
                   think he'd agree with that. And I have no doubt of it. I have no regrets, no
                   matter how hard it was. I wouldn't have given up one second with him. And
                   what happened in the end was his destiny. As his song says, "Destiny . . .
                   dance with me, my destiny." And how sweet the music was. The sound of it
                   will forever live on, just like Nick, and our love for him.

                   He was a priceless gift. He taught me everything worth knowing about life
                   and love. May God bless and keep him, and smile with him, until we meet
                   again.

                   And may God keep you safe on your journey.

                   d.s.