Grief is a Funny Thing, Part 1
It’s not about me. Somewhere in the mid-1990s, the contemporary Christian group DC Talk had a hit called In the Light. If you’ll allow me to paraphrase some of the lyrics from that song, I am the queen of excuses. I’ve got one for everything I do – or in this case, everything I don’t do. And I use them. A lot. Thus begins the litany of the “reasons” I haven’t been writing, REALLY writing, for over three years.
I keep trying to convince you (and perhaps myself) that it goes back to my mother’s death in the summer of 2015. But here’s the thing. It does, and it doesn’t.
It does, because I always said Mom was my biggest cheerleader. She was an avid reader – in my original author bio it said she was never seen without a book in her hand. I like to imagine that description still fits her. When my first book was finally published, being the staunch supporter of her only daughter that she was, Mom procured a copy. She called me soon thereafter and said she was having a hard time setting about the task of reading it. (Mind you, my mother never had a hard time reading a book in her life.) When I asked her why she said, “Because I can’t stop thinking about the fact that you wrote it.” It was a point of humor between us for a while. “Pretend I didn’t write it,” I’d tell her. “That’s the only advice I can give you.” She did, eventually, get past the idea and submerged herself in the story instead, and assured me on the back end that it was good, that first book. Another book or two later, I finally had the forethought to offer her a typed copy of a pre-published manuscript to read and give me her thoughts on. Sadly, I don’t remember now whether we actually accomplished such an exchange. I don’t remember a lot of things about what I did or didn’t do, what I’ve done or haven’t done, with respect to my writing, because of my mother and the correlation between the two. When she died, that part of my life simply shut down.
It doesn’t, because losing Mom wasn’t the inhibitor of my creativity; using her death as an excuse was the real culprit. That excuse should’ve run its course much, much sooner than this. I’ve come to realize that excuse has become a foundation for more excuses.
Okay, it is about me. I’ve come to realize, after slogging through the mud and muck my excuses always seem to leave behind, that from the beginning – and I mean the very beginning – I’ve been my own worst enemy.
I didn’t set out to be a writer from the get-go. I should have. When I said, in the not too distant past, that I’d finally figured out what I wanted to be when I grew up, my brother’s response was, “Well, I could’ve told you that.” It should also be noted that at one of our reunions, when they found out I was writing, my high school classmates said pretty much the same thing. They weren’t surprised. Apparently, everyone knew I should have been a writer. Everyone, that is, but me. So, I’ve learned this. The problem with me doesn’t go back three years. It goes back three decades.
At the risk of sounding immodest, I’ve always been a pretty smart kid. I was one of those weirdos who actually enjoyed school (dubbed, like Hermione Granger, an insufferable know-it-all), and I discovered early on those subjects to which I had a particular affinity: history; the foreign languages; English/Literature. I learned that I didn’t have to put much effort into my studies to earn good grades. The more I enjoyed a subject, the better I did; for those I wasn’t so keen on, I learned to muddle through. I didn’t particularly like science and math, but I was smart enough to get by, to get decent grades, to graduate in the top ten percent of my class. When I got to college, with a view toward a career I’d set my sights on from the time I was six, I chose to major in Biology and wing my way toward medical school. I was smart, by gum. I could do this. I refused to listen to our advisors, those people who kept telling all us incoming freshmen that more than half of us would change our majors within our first two years. Not me, I said. I’m gonna do this doctor thing, I said. Remember, I’m smart.
Reality has a way of crashing down on you when you least expect it. After nearly failing two science courses in the first semester of my sophomore year, Fate found me sitting in the middle of the floor of my dorm room, sobbing, course book in one hand, phone in the other, begging Mom and Dad to let me change my major. I had discovered how much I hated science. I no longer wanted to be a doctor. They were very supportive, ultimately insisting it wasn’t up to them. It was up to me, they said.
A fat lot of help that was, I thought back then. What choice had I, an 18-year-old who’d wanted to be a doctor since she was six, when that career suddenly turned out to be the very last thing on earth she actually wanted to do? I had no clue. Suddenly, I wasn’t so smart anymore.
I’d started writing long before college, long before high school, even. I loved to write. Thought I had a God-given talent for it. It’s common knowledge that hindsight is 20/20. What I should have done, probably? Was to major in a field that would’ve allowed me to get back to doing what I was good at, what I loved to do. Like, I don’t know, English, maybe? Creative Writing, perhaps? As much as I touted my creativity as a God-given talent, I did a poor job of exploring what I could’ve done with that talent. What I was supposed to be doing with that talent. What I should’ve been doing with that talent all along.
The problem was, back then I didn’t have the courage to go out on that proverbial limb, to take my chances that my “God-given talent” would carry me where I needed to go, to even think there was a possibility I could write my way into some kind of lucrative career. I’ll go so far as to say, I was stupid. Stupid and desperate. (See, I can admit this now.) I was desperate to do something “worthwhile” – I mean, seriously, my original plan was to be a doctor; I’d wanted to help people. By the time I’d reached this point, low as it was, I didn’t care so much about helping people, I was just desperate to not be majoring in Biology. So desperate that I quite literally flipped through that course book and picked the first degree I came across that sounded remotely interesting and that the classes I’d already taken would count toward.
In 1985, Forensic Studies was just transitioning to its new moniker, Criminal Justice, and there were two paths to choose. In spite of my previous desire to help people, I didn’t want to be a cop, though neither did I want to be a lawyer. Ultimately I chose the path that would allow me the most freedom to decide what career to pursue after graduation. (I should add that once I got started with my new classes, I loved them.) Now I have an aging piece of paper in a frame on my study wall that says I have a Bachelor of Arts in Criminal Justice from the Indiana University College of Arts and Sciences. And what am I doing with that? It’s funny you should ask...
Full circle. So here we are, thirty-plus years later. I’ve done a lot of things in that amount of time. What I’ve never done, or should say haven’t done yet, is to increase my knowledge of what I need to be doing as far as making my writing a real, honest day’s work kind of pursuit.
I said earlier that school was a fair breeze for me. I don’t remember ever having to work to learn things. I just learned. It was that whole smart-kid thing I had going on. For me, learning was easy. You know how they say if you love what you do you’ll never work a day in your life? I loved to learn. Still do, as a matter of fact. So, given all of this 20/20 hindsight, learning comes easily, do something with my God-given talent stuff, maybe-just-maybe I should get back to that idea of exploring what it means to really be what I’m supposed to be? To do what I’m supposed to be doing? Huh. Maybe I should try that. Maybe I’ll learn something.
My full circle began with that decision in the late fall of 1985 to change my major from Biology to Criminal Justice. One of the brightest points at the beginning of the road was that my GPA went from dreadful to stellar in the turn of a semester. (One of the others, and probably most important, was meeting my future husband, in marching band. I may not be doing much with that degree, but the WGH is still around.) But the first of the subsequent three decades found me traversing a rather wonky loop from medicine to forensics and back to medicine but with forensics. Really, I’m not sure that wheel isn’t still turning. After college I went on to paralegal school, worked for a lawyer for about six months, decided the law wasn’t such a good fit for me after all, and found myself working in the medical field again; it’s where I’m rooted now, having been doing it for nearly all of those thirty years. As if all that weren’t dizzying enough, a series of seemingly random but fortuitous circumstances led me back to a somewhat shaded, peripheral version of that field in which I earned my degree, when in the year 2000 I became a published crime fiction author. Better late than never, right?
There’s always an up side. Despite the roundabout way in which I came to be where I am today, I look back on these thirty-plus years and truly am grateful for the experiences I’ve had. Lots of quotes and clichés come to mind: what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger; it’s not the years, it’s the mileage (I think that one’s mine, actually); you learn from your mistakes; everything happens for a reason; write what you know – being ensconced in the medical field has actually facilitated a lot of really awesome research for the books. Lots of Scripture comes to mind too, but this isn’t a Bible lesson or my personal testimony. That’s for a completely different dissertation. But I do think God led me on this path, this journey, so that I could come to this point and be able to look back and say, oh so that’s where we were going with this.
Grief is a Funny Thing, Part 2
It’s not about me, again. Those fortuitous circumstances I mentioned brought my friend Terry into my life. She came to work in my department at the medical practice I was working for at the time, somewhere around 1996, and we became fast friends almost immediately. She used to say we were two bodies sharing the same brain, only she was afraid to venture into my half of said brain without a guide. It was Terry, later to assume the title of World’s Most Voracious Reader or WMVR on my former blog Let’s Do Lunch – The World According to J.B., who encouraged me to finish that first novel. It was Terry who came up with the nickname that would become my first pen-name. It was Terry who helped me piece together missing plot points in what she called our “flop across the bed sessions”, which started with one that lasted nearly three hours (and that was after a full day of Christmas shopping) and involved both of us lying on our tummies on her bed with a legal pad between us, jotting notes and hashing over details of how to bring two solid chunks of story into one cohesive arc with two simple words: “What map?”
Last Thursday, November 8th, my dear friend passed from this life into the next. I am heartbroken, but not for the reasons that might immediately come to mind. Her health – both physical and mental – had been declining for quite some time, and in recent conversations with her daughters, we all agreed that the woman we knew and loved had ceased to exist a very long time ago. The last time I spoke with her I could tell something was very off, and though it saddens me that she is no longer with us, my grief is for the loss of the vibrant and life-loving person she used to be.
Her smile could brighten the darkest room, and her laugh was infectious. She took great pride in her abilities but was humbled by her ability to help people. She had an amazing work ethic and encouraged others to hold themselves to the same standards. She was a strong, faithful woman who did a darn good job of raising two terrific girls as a single mother. When life handed her lemons, she didn’t just make lemonade, she made lemon tarts, lemon custard, and lemon meringue pie. Like me, she was an overzealous and instinctive learner. And oh, did she love to read. Her dad used to say she didn’t read books, she devoured them. When she found out, within the first week of our working together, that I was trying to write a book, her immediate response was, “Bring it in, I want to read it!”
From there we set out on the journey of getting that book published. She would request (and by request, I mean demand) that I write a new chapter every night and bring it in to work the next day for her to read. She’d read on our lunch break, make notes and suggestions, then tell me to go home and write another chapter. She stood by my side when I signed that first contract. She became my first publicist, helping me arrange book signings and spreading the word about the book (and people, this was before social media went rabid), all the while keeping after me about writing the next book.
The brainstorming sessions continued, even after she moved out of state, and though most of the time we did them by phone, we would laugh together at the fact that we were both flopped across our respective beds. She visited as often as she could manage, and we’d make a point to take advantage of the time together to hold an impromptu flop across the bed session just to keep our relationship as writer and first reader cemented. If my mother was my biggest cheerleader, Terry was a close second (my own two daughters notwithstanding, as at the time they were not old enough to read what I was writing).
Writers write for a lot of different reasons, and a lot of different writers will expound on their reasons of choice with varying degrees of conviction as to which is foremost in logic and in truth. Some writers write for themselves (write the kind of book you’d want to read, they say). Others write for a target audience. My Mom and Terry were representative of my target, though strictly speaking they were both enough like me that I suppose it could be said that I do, in fact, write the kind of books I like to read.
Terry was the kind of reader we writers love to have as fans. While she remained devoted to her favorite authors, she became an instant advocate for newly published writers she liked. She could sell a room full of strangers six different types of genre fiction depending on their preferences. (She was one of the first readers to tell me that my then-new friend J.T. Ellison was going to be a huge success someday.) I often told her she should have worked in a bookstore. Her response was always a big smile and a “That’s my dream job!” I can picture her now, cozied up in Heaven’s sitting room, surrounded by books, sipping tea from a steaming mug decorated with irises and talking with Robert B. Parker and John D. MacDonald about Spenser and Travis McGee. They will love her as much as I did.
So yes, it is about me. A month ago I took myself into downtown Nashville to wander around at the Southern Festival of Books. Whilst there I was fortunate enough to run into several writer friends I hadn’t seen in a number of years. They made it a point to ask if I was still writing. For the past three years I’ve dreaded people asking me that question. I explained about Mom and how my personal/emotional environment hadn’t been quite conducive to my getting much accomplished on that front, but that things were starting to gel again in my brain, and maybe I’d be getting back to it soon.
I didn’t realize until this past week how much truth there was in what I was saying. If my mother’s death started me on a downward spiral of excuses not to write, I am starting to believe that Terry’s death has brought me to the realization that the spiral was, in fact, another circle that has now found its end, inextricably intertwined with its beginning. The fact that I have spent the better part of a day writing this piece (all 3039 words of it) sparks a tiny bit of hope, at least in my own eyes, toward the possibility of there being a future for my writing career.
I think I owe it to both of them.
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