There's a photograph that changed a man's life. Not a
photograph he was in, just one he happened to see: a volunteer at Mother
Teresa's Home for the Dying in Calcutta, carrying a dying man in his arms. Tony
Cointreau looked at that image and couldn't put it down, couldn't explain why
it wouldn't leave him alone. He was, by every measure that usually matters,
already set for life. Born into the family behind the Cointreau liqueur empire,
he'd built a career as an international singer and performer, the kind of life
most people spend their whole lives chasing. And yet that one photograph pulled
him somewhere else entirely, toward hospice floors, diapers, disinfectant, and
a friendship with one of the most famous women of the twentieth century.
Ten years after it was first published, Cointreau's book about that journey, A Gift of Love: Lessons Learned From My Work and Friendship with Mother Teresa, is getting a tenth anniversary edition. And this time around, it arrives with a bit of fresh shine on it too. Cointreau was just named Best International Arthouse Writer for the anniversary edition at the 2026 International Film Music and Literature Festival in Bologna, Italy, proof that a decade later, the book still has something to say.
Twelve Years, Three Flights of Stairs, and a Tape Recorder
The book didn't start as a book. It started as a habit. Every night, after a full day volunteering at Gift of Love, Mother Teresa's New York City hospice for men dying of AIDS, Cointreau would come home and talk into a tape recorder for half an hour. He wasn't writing for an audience. He was decompressing, trying to process a day spent scrubbing three flights of stairs on his hands and knees, disinfecting tables and chairs, and sitting with men whose bodies and dignity were both slipping away from them at the same time.
His first day on the job says everything about how far outside his comfort zone he'd wandered. Tasked with handing out medication, he mixed up the doses for two patients and was convinced, for one terrifying stretch, that he'd killed them. A nun calmly told him not to worry, they were on the same medicine anyway. He never made that mistake again. By four o'clock that first afternoon, he was wrung out, unsure if he'd been any good at all, weighed down by a helplessness that anyone who has ever sat with someone dying will recognize instantly. But that night, lying in bed, he decided he had to go back. Something about those men, he'd later say, felt like his whole life had been leading up to that point.
He kept going back. For twelve years, in New York and later in Calcutta, at the very hospice where that original photograph had been taken.
What
Mother Teresa Was Actually Like
Once, she asked how much his hotel cost.
When she was shocked to learn that the rate was per day, not per week, he
added, “I did not take a vow of poverty.” She laughingly teased him, “No, you
took a vow of luxury.” When he asked her to sign a photo of herself holding a
candle, its flame lighting up every wrinkle on her face, she just laughed and
said, “Look at this old face.” A Gift of Love isn't a saintly, distant portrait
of Mother Teresa. It's closer, funnier, and more human than that. Cointreau remembers
her sense of humor as much as her devotion.
Underneath the humor was the philosophy that shaped everything Cointreau learned from her: "We can do no great things, only small things with great love." That line runs through the entire book, not as a slogan, but as something he watched her actually live out, one small act at a time, for years.
Why the Book Still Matters
In 2002, a progressive neurological condition ended Cointreau's ability to keep volunteering. Sitting on the porch of his home in Vermont, listening back through years of his own recorded voice, he realized there was still one more thing he could do: pass along what he'd learned, not as a medical guide, but as one person telling another how to actually be present for someone at the end of their life. Listening without judgment. Offering dignity instead of pity. Sitting with fear instead of trying to talk someone out of it.
That's the audience this tenth anniversary edition is really written for, the millions of people right now who are caring for an aging parent, a dying spouse, a friend running out of time, and have no idea what to do with their hands or their fear. Cointreau has said that if the book reaches even one person flailing in panic while trying to help someone they love, the whole journey will have been worth it.
Readers can find A Gift of Love, tenth anniversary edition, on Amazon.