Last year I had several emotional whiplash-inducing experiences.
The last several years have been difficult and sometimes confusing, as I was the primary caregiver for my Mom, who unfortunately passed away last June. Two weeks after she passed, and while I was still mourning and recovering from my loss and it’s various fallouts, my granddaughter was born. This was a truly joyous event, and becoming a grandmother was something that I had frankly given up on. For the longest time, neither one of my daughters showed any inclination whatsoever towards motherhood. I had come to believe that this was an experience that I just wasn’t meant to have in this life. I had grown OK with that and then lo and behold, I learned that I would indeed be a grandmother after all. My granddaughter was born the day after we celebrated our Independence in this country. Although it’s a great joy, I must say, I feel somewhat less independent than I did before I was a grandmother, primarily because I want to be close enough to see my granddaughter as often as possible. As it is, we live about five hours apart and there is a big mountain between us, known as “The Rockies.”
Then, in September, my husband suffered a cardiac arrest. His heart stopped beating entirely. For all intents and purposes, he was dead when the EMT’s arrived at the house. They worked on him for 30 minutes before his heart was beating again. He had to be resuscitated three times. When his heart was beating on its own, he was stable enough to be transported to the hospital by ambulance. After conducting some initial tests, he was admitted to the ICU and placed on life support. They put him in an induced coma and lowered his body temperature for 48 hours. This is supposed to help his body to focus on recovery only and not on any other functions. After 48 hours, they began warming him up and reducing the medication that put him in the coma. The expectation was that he would wake up on Day 3, except John didn’t wake up. Five days went by, and he still didn’t wake up. We were expecting to have to make a difficult decision about life support on the following Monday or Tuesday.
On Sunday morning, I received a call from the doctor. He told me that John was awake! He was smiling and could say a few words. A miracle! I hurried over to the hospital, and I was so happy to see him alive and awake. But that was only the beginning. John spent 30 days in the hospital recovering. His recovery continues, but he’s doing remarkably well, and today we went to church together for the first time since his cardiac event. He’s walking without the walker and he’s talking without the delay that he had when he first was recovering.
In the middle of all this, I was suffering from my own health problems, which I had become aware of earlier in the year. I’m glad I found out why I had been feeling so weird, but my health problems were slowing me down considerably while I struggled to regain my previous level of fitness and physical abilities. It’s the first time I’ve ever received a diagnosis I had to spend months recovering from, but thankfully, I did recover sufficiently with time.
So, my summer was book-ended by two terrible events. My mother’s death in June, and my husband’s near-death in September.
In between those two events, I had started to recover some from the trauma of my mom’s death, and I self-published a book I had been working on for a few years. I titled it “A Season of Mindful Photography: Autumn”. It’s a book of short essays and photographs, all taken from August through October, the season of harvest. Some people have referred to it as a devotional, and in a sense it is. Every essay has a photograph that goes with it, and a verse from The Bible, and in some cases, quotes from other sources as well. It works as a daily devotional and is the length of a season: just over 90 essays.
I enjoyed the creative process of writing and putting that book together, but I must admit, it was a long project. I started it before I even retired from my HR career in 2017. Then, with all the hubbub of retiring from a 25-year HR career, getting my old house ready for sale, relocating to western Colorado, purchasing a new home, and having my mom move in with me, I set the book aside and didn’t finish it until early last year. Then, I had to figure out how to self-publish it, and for some odd reason, this took me awhile. It’s possible that I was so preoccupied with other things, that I couldn’t see what was right in front of my face until I began to come down from all the other events from birth to death that I had been consumed with earlier in the year. Then suddenly, I was able to see how to publish a book on Amazon, and I did so post haste. It felt great to have it finished! Suddenly, it was real and more than just an idea in my mind.
Now I’m considering a different book project: a full-on non-fiction book with chapters that define a beginning, a middle, and an end. I’m aware that it’s different than writing a book of essays. A book of essays doesn’t necessarily have to conform to that type of outline.
As I consider doing this, I would like to say I’ll have it all done in a year, but the truth is, I probably won’t. I’ll have some reading and research to do on my own, and then I’ll need to outline it before I can really start writing. This alone will take quite a while, possibly several months. I often tend to be unrealistic in my timelines, thinking I can complete the building of Rome over a long weekend. I remember Wayne Dyer saying he wrote his first book over a long weekend or something like that. But hey! No pressure. Whew!
Not only am I talking to myself about realistic timelines, but I also have never written such a book before, so it’s all new to me. I have no idea if can really do this, but I’m going to give it the old college try. Much like my first book, I want to feel that sense of accomplishment when it’s finally finished and published. Even though I put my first book aside more than once, I always returned to it until it felt finished to me. I had grave doubts at various times, that I would ever really finish it. That said, I have been practicing my writing for years, and have written an autobiography of the first 20 years of my life, which I probably will never publish, but it was good practice and fairly easy to write. I was able to stick with it without too many delays. It’s just over 50,000 words, which is a good size for a book like that. 50,000 words are a lot to write without the possibility of publishing, but it’s worth it just for the experience of doing it, and to know you can, in fact, do it. For anyone who’s thinking of being a writer, I would recommend using your autobiography as a beginning project. I have a friend who wrote a book about her early adulthood and abusive marriages, but she framed it as a novel, which I think could also be a good idea. The thing about autobiographical stories is, anyone else who’s also lived the events with you will have a different take on them than you do. Your truth may seem like lies to them, or at least embellishment. Be ready for controversy unless you frame it as a novel. I thought that was a very smart idea.
I look forward to this new project even though I begin with some trepidation. The book I have in mind is likely to be between 50,000 and 75,000 words and have at least a dozen photographs. So, fewer photos, but at least some. Why? Because I’m a photographer and I think artwork ads punch to words. Depending upon how it seems like it’s going, I may make some effort to find a publisher, but, at the very least, I’ll self-publish again. This isn’t about the world’s concept of success or failure, but rather, about living the process. Over the time it takes me to complete this project, I’ll be thinking less about results, and more about the process itself. Instead of trying to meet a deadline, I’ll work on consistency of action.
If there is one thing I’ve learned personally from last year’s events, it’s that each day is precious and should be enjoyed in the present moment with less concern about making a deadline. The word deadline alone speaks volumes about what it is. There are some things, especially in the world of business, that require deadlines to be met. But a writer without a contract doesn’t need to be concerned about such things, and can revel in the process, taking it one day at a time. That’s my working plan.
By the way, if you would like to purchase my book of essays and photographs, it can be found on my Amazon author page at www.amazon.com/author/DebbyPowell. The kindle version may be purchased for only $5.99, and the paperback is listed at $24.70. Amazon sets the minimum price depending on the cost of printing. Each book is printed on demand.
Adventures on Earth and Beyond 