The Thing You Can't Do

Last week I wrote about Ron burying one of our goats, something he had to do although I’m sure he never wanted to. Ron loved a challenge—as long as it was related to the carpentry trade. To renovate our farmhouse, he learned wiring and stone pointing and all sorts of framing, drywall, flooring, and finishing techniques.

In other words, he loved to acquire anything he could hang from his tool belt. He shied away, though, from challenges that would stretch him from the inside out. Instead of staying as his father lay dying in the hospital, he offered to take his mother home—a move he regretted so much he mentioned it in his suicide note five years later. I was the one who stayed with Lloyd that last, long night. I’d never seen anyone die before, either—but I didn’t think he should do it alone.

Due to my need to commit Ron to psychiatric treatment against his will, and his subsequent suicide standoff, Ron continued to give me ample opportunities to do things I thought I couldn’t. It seems odd to call them “opportunities,” but in the long view, that’s what they were: each impossible challenge I met made me a larger, stronger person.

It wasn’t a lesson I sought to learn from him, but Ron taught me that sometimes you’ve got to do that thing you think you can’t.

Here are a few of the challenges I faced after Ron’s death, which I write about in my memoir:

1. I had to contest a lawyer’s invoice when, unbeknownst to me, divorce services originally valued at $3,000 had transitioned, upon Ron’s death, into a $15,000 estate case (I had no experience with lawyers; until then I had only ever bartered for the purchase of a Christmas tree).

2. I had to tell my eight- and ten-year-old sons that their father had killed himself.

3. I had to scrape pieces of my husband’s brain off the wall of his woodworking shop, where the Hazmat team missed them.

4. After six months, I finally found a service that could clean up after mace—the police who shot it into Ron's shop, to try to get him to come out during the standoff, had no clue how to help me.

5. I sold my husband’s guns (I knew nothing of guns, was scared to touch them, and felt faint standing in the gun shop).

6. I took a weekend after Christmas, waiting on one toll-free number after another, to cancel 29 active credit cards I didn't know about (I’ve refused every offer of new credit since, no matter what the enticement).

7. Dealt with #s 1–6 above, and more, while teaching my sons—who should never have had to witness any of this—that hope is always possible to find.

8. Watched as a vet euthanized my dear dog Max, because he too suffered from the suicide standoff, and while life left his body I was determined that my loving eyes would be the last thing he’d see—then brought him home and buried him on the farm.

9. Stayed on the farm to raise my children, facing down again and again and again what happened there.

10. Through all of this, held tight enough to my belief in the possibility of a healthy, enduring love that I was able to marry again.

I've learned that all sorts of things are possible. I remember once thinking that I’d never be able to swim a half-mile—then I swam two.

I, like my husband Dave, am afraid of heights—yet we climbed the Beehive at Acadia National Park in Maine (pictured above).

I thought I'd never travel abroad then Dave and I accompanied the boys on their school choir trip to Italy and watched them sing in the Vatican.

I recently thought I’d never be able to lose weight at my age—then, with hard work, lost 15 lbs.

I didn't think I could face caring for my parents, who suffer from dementia—but I am.

I once thought I’d never amass enough words or ideas to fill a book, but the memoir I’m writing is my third. Can I get any of them published? It's harder than ever for a first-time author to break into print and yet... Who knows what other feats I’m capable of?

I've decided there’s never shame in falling short of a goal. Because if you don’t try, you’ll never know. The trying, in and of itself, can add value to your life.

What have you done, that you thought you’d never be able to do?

Gotta crow!

Okay, yes, this image is a fun homage to my former life on the farm. But it's also a pretty accurate representation of how I'm feeling today, now that the first chapter of my memoir, modified as a stand-alone essay, has been published.

If you’d like to read my essay, you can get to it here.

If you already heard this news through other means, I apologize. My approach to public relations is basically to amass a whole lot of interpersonal relations, so sometimes there’s overlap. Last year for example, as chair of The Write Stuff, I spent 14 hours personally e-mailing everyone in my writing group's database to invite them to the conference. In addition, I sent out personal e-mails to contacts within other writing groups; this was in addition to our national advertising. It worked—we sold out the conference—but this was not the easy route, by any means.

But I’ve never really embraced the easy way. Even as a kid—do it just because my mom tells me to? No way. Use the formula just because the algebra teacher says to? Show me how to derive it first, Mrs. Arnold. That same depth of focus (okay, bull-headedness) would one day allow me—a teen who could never make it across the half-mile width of the lake while swimming with her sisters—to become a woman who, since turning 50, has several times swum its 2-mile length.

I would lean heavily upon that stick-to-it-iveness in life. There is nothing easy about healing from the suicide of a loved one. After reading my published essay, one writing friend was surprised to hear it had happened 13 years ago, because when she was reading it had felt so immediate.

I’m glad I captured that, because that’s the paradox that exists in my mind, as well—the events of that time are both distant and near. Ron’s suicide both repels my attention and seduces it; its power is both centrifugal and centripetal.

Given that the perception of time is not a constant, and the path forward is never uniformly groomed or even evident, I’m glad I didn’t leave my healing to time and distance alone. I’m not sure that would have done the trick.

Developing the skills to write about these events has been as effortful as the healing. Although I was published for 19 years as a journalist, creative writing is an entirely different challenge, and doing it well enough to get published has been no walk in the park. I sought publication for two reasons, really: like any writer I wanted the validation of my skills, but I also want to communicate—and because that requires both a speaker and a listener, writing is only the front half of the equation.

By extending my reach, the publication of the first chapter of Standoff at Ronnie’s Place has allowed me to find readers. But I found an unanticipated gift hidden in this process. The audience I’ve found isn’t just listening—it’s talking back. The comments and private notes from those who have read this piece, like the comments of those who have read this blog, are precious to me. Like building a conference, I am now building a readership—one interpersonal relationship at a time.

Thank you. My life is so much richer for this.

The way I see it: I triumph once by making my way through the dark forest of horrific events, sorting through and taming the brambles threatening to ensnare me. But I triumph again when publication shines its light on the many souls who surround me on this path. I am not alone. We are sisters and brothers all, finding one another.

That’s something to crow about.

The still small voice--that nags

PETER vs MOTHER

I want to thank the readers who have been sending me private e-mails in response to my blog posts. It means so much to me to be connecting with others about matters that I find so important.

In this case I specifically want to thank Linda B. Glaser, whose response to the question posed in my last post was so brilliant I'd really rather use it than give the answer I had prepared! With her permission, I pass along her comments about how to recognize the voice of God:

I love what that insurance salesman said: “If you don’t think your life is worth recording, you aren’t taking your life seriously enough.”

Your mother’s words, on the other hand, essentially invalidate the value of the past. As the saying [by American philosopher George Santayana] goes, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Without looking backward, we’ll never know if the patterns unfolding are ones we are repeating over and over and over.

How does one know the voice of G-d? It resonates in our bones with the clarity of a ringing bell. It transforms our understanding and our outlook. As Yeats wrote, “All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.” When we are privileged to hear that still, small voice, and we are honest with ourselves, we do recognize it.

Your mother’s words, on the other hand, sounded very human to me.

Linda exemplifies the process of listening for the voice of God in my story. She did not look for who was right and who was wrong in what Peter (the insurance salesman) or my mother said; she looked for what seemed divine and what seemed inexorably human.

Some context: My mother's father was an alcoholic; he committed suicide when she was seventeen. This happened before therapeutic support became commonplace, so "that was then, this is now” was the prevailing attitude toward “healing,” and it suited her disposition. I didn't know about my mother's father until I was sixteen, when I finally asked her how he died. Enter Linda's admonition that we are bound to repeat history if we fail to examine it: my mother was "coincidentally" stuck with me the full day of the standoff at the farm, when my own alcoholic husband committed suicide. My mother says she remembers nothing from that day.

With our psyches as with physical danger, human personalities exhibit the fight or flight sensibilities more prevalent in other animal species. To the casual observer, "fighting"—my choice—might seem harder. But it takes great energy to sustain a lifetime of flight away from the fact that, as Yeats said, "all changed," denying the unwanted ramifications of this choice, reaching for fantasies that evaporate in our grasp, and suppressing the still small voice that begs attention. I don't have the strength for that.

So I choose to keep my feet firmly rooted in life's realities, and seek its "terrible beauty." When the time comes that I must face death, I want to know that I have truly lived.

So to answer the quandary put forth in my previous post: in whose voice did I hear the voice of God?

Because I want to learn, because I want to be challenged and long to be transformed, because I believe we are all characters in a common story, and because I believe in the resiliency of the human spirit, the still small voice inside me—which has been nagging me ever since that insurance party to stop with Christmas break already and get back to work—resonated with Peter's statement.

I will honor the precious gift of my life by continuing to write the memoir.

I sense another voice, now, not quite so small. It's Linda, saying: "Get back to work."

"Till Death Do Us Part"

I’ve thought about the above words a lot since Ron lifted them from our wedding vows and scrawled them, at a dramatic pitch, at the end of his suicide note. That act alone is an attention-getter, but in addition, his suicide note comprised the largest outpouring of feeling I’d ever received from him.

Then he disappeared from this world with a single shotgun blast, spattering the words with drops of his blood.

I still have the note. I do not have him to discuss this with. So I chase his spirit in my writing—Turn around! Talk to me! Hear me!—hoping to milk what meaning I can from his choices and actions.

With his postscript Ron was referring to the fact that despite vowing to love him until death, I had, some eight weeks earlier, begun divorce proceedings. Alcoholism had obliterated what sense of fiscal responsibility he’d had, and since he wouldn’t seek help for he drinking or our marriage or the spending, I needed to protect our children and me from any further harm in this regard.

He chose to pre-empt the divorce on his own terms—he’d wanted to live on the farm together as a family until he died. He did so.

Three years later, I was ready to make that same vow again.

A fundamentalist Christian friend voiced a strong opinion about this: Dave and I were not free to marry. You gotta love a woman who speaks her mind, you know?

According to her beliefs, I was free to marry Dave because my husband had died. Dave was not free to marry me, however, because he had divorced.

I couldn’t play that game. I knew in my heart my marriage to Ron was over and could see, in retrospect, that the difference between divorce or death in my case was only a matter of timing.

It never ceases to amaze me, since we all worship the same Creator, how differently we believers choose to draw boundaries between right and wrong. Luckily, not all Christians are as rigid as my friend. Dave and I found a pastor who believes, as we did, that God will forgive choices that result in no-win situations because God loves us, expects us to grow, and challenges us to bring good things into the world.

So I imagine Ron might be as surprised as my conservative friend to hear that I believe, as Ron did, that what God joined together, I did not have the power to put asunder. I see that as a separate issue from enacting my legal right to extricate myself, to the extent possible, from the consequences of his choices. But I remember the soul connection with the man that I loved, and even beyond his death, Ron will be with me for the rest of my life.

So I was never “free” to marry Dave. Yet I chose him.

And I guess he wanted me, ghosts and all.

More on that, in Dave's and my words, in the next post. What do you think—are we ever truly freed from our choices?

Memoir bigamy

I am married to two men. One is alive...

...and one is dead.

I married Dave three years after my first husband Ron’s death. He was pretty brave to do so. At the time I met him, a cursory look at my relationship qualifications might have gone something like this: “Over the course of 15 years she drove her husband to drink, and then when she told him she planned to leave him, he killed himself. Bonus: two disillusioned sons entering adolescence.”

That’s not an ad most men would answer.

But Dave's a special kind of guy. Early on, he told me: “I know Ron’s suicide is something you’ll carry with you for the rest of your life.” Considering that’s the exact same term Dave expects to spend with me, I guess he knew what he was signing up for.

Or did he?

It’s no secret: lately I’ve been spending a lot more time with my first husband than I had ever planned to. The memoir requires that I remember what I loved about Ron, and why I wanted to start a family with him. I’m re-immersing myself in some of the most precious times of my life, none of which included Dave.

On any given morning I might have spent hours writing a scene about my life with Ron on the farm, hearing the horses whinny, smelling the manure—only to hear Dave call up to tell me it's an hour past lunch time, do I want soup? Sometimes I fall asleep beside Dave but spend the night with Ron, who visits me in dreams that I share with Dave when I wake up.

A friend of mine, in a comment after a recent post, described my memoir writing as "periodically pulling back the curtain" to share my reflections. I thought that was beautifully put. At times, though, the curtain between my two worlds is as thin as gauze, and the suddenness of such time travel can be discombobulating.

I asked Dave if the time I spend with Ron bothers him. He said that he knows I still have questions, so does he, and he encourages me to keep searching. Dave does love a good mystery. But he also admitted: “I have been jealous a few times. Especially about the dreams. I guess I wish you might dream about me every once in awhile.”

First let me just say how cute I thought that was.

But when he said that, it made me think: I believe Dave is in my life because I did dream of him. Despite all I went through with Ron, the loss of that relationship left me with a vision of marriage that I still hoped to bring into my life. And when Dave arrived, it didn’t take long for me to recognize him.

Truth is, I don’t need to dream about Dave. For the past ten years he has been my rock-solid reality. And when I need to talk with him about something, he’s always there, ready to listen and share his own feelings.

Beyond the first few years of our relationship, I’m not so sure Ron ever listened to me, although he liked to hear me talk. And he rarely shared his feelings with me.

And so, thirteen years beyond his death, I continue to chase him.

Was I even “free” to marry Dave? There are those who think not—including myself. More about that in my next post.

Zero Tolerance

“More than a decade later, the sound waves from that one shotgun blast continue to ripple through time.”

~from my memoir, Standoff at Ronnie’s Place

It stands to reason that Ron’s suicide continues to have ramifications in our lives. Perhaps one of the most obvious and immediate influences it had was on my policy concerning teen alcohol use.

I said to my sons: “If either of you comes home smelling of alcohol before you graduate from high school, you are not taking what happened to your father seriously enough. If I smell booze on you once you are going into 30-day inpatient rehab, no questions asked.”

Sound extreme? Good. I was feeling extreme. Was it even fair? Probably not—I went to beer parties when I was in high school. At one, the driver of the car I arrived in got so drunk that her wild dancing sent one of her wooden clogs flying from her foot through the side of a big expensive fish tank. Kegger over. The house emptied as quickly as the tank. Fish flowed helplessly from from it to flop around on the soaked family room carpet. This same girl drove us home, pulling over to the side of the road once so she could throw up.

Problem was, we suffered no adverse consequences besides the basic confusion that we called this “fun” when it made us feel ashamed and sick. We got home without a car accident. We got away with sneaking into our houses past our curfews. We lived to drink underage again. As a member of Mothers Against Drunk Driving for the past twenty years, I cringe at that thought of what might have happened. But it didn’t.

Now that I was a mother I had to act on the best possible information. That included a slew of drinking and driving statistics from MADD and other sources. And thanks to the events of the final eight weeks of his life we now had the information that Ron had an incredible tolerance for alcohol. He could drink as many as a dozen shots of whiskey in an evening—enough to put most of us into life-threatening alcohol poisoning—before becoming visibly drunk. At the time my kids were teens, research suggested this to be an inheritable trait. And until science reversed itself on this issue, or until my sons were mature enough to make a responsible and legal decision, I didn’t want them messing with liquid fire. They would not become addicts on my watch.

My sons got through high school without me having to invoke my zero tolerance policy. My first-born may have stories to tell me about that some day, who knows.

But not Marty. He was developing a zero tolerance policy of his own.

More on that in my next post, set for Ron’s birthday: Halloween. Some will find its content frightening.

Memoira Interruptus

As reflected in my spotty writing at this blog, I interrupted work on my memoir this past year and opted to funnel my writing in other directions.

These are the reasons I wish I could give you for turning my back on the examination of my own life:

1. I finally got life all figured out.
2. Because I moved from the farm I never thought about Ron, or what happened there, again.
3. Life in Doylestown has been a non-stop string of welcome parades, tea parties with the rich and famous, and HGTV interviews.
4. Against all economic odds, my editing business took off at such a rate I'm still adjusting to the G forces.
5. Oprah called me and said that despite the fact my novels haven't yet been published, she read my mind, loved my ideas, and booked me for her show...and the rest is history.

Okay, okay, by number 5 I know you realized the entire list is fantasy. I'm still clueless; while at the lake this year I truly missed Ron for the first time; my life in Doylestown has felt like a constant string of attendance at book signings—for my friends' books; my editing business was as affected by the economy as the next person's, leaving plenty of time for writing; and I've continued to market my novel because I know darned well you can't possibly get published if you leave your book in the closet.

So what did cause me to abandon the memoir project, especially after going so far as type all the notes into a computer document and play with several different versions of its structure?

Surface reasons: I didn't want to expose others while sharing my truth. I didn't know the best way to structure the story. Agents told me the story would be easier to sell if I novelized it, because I could make it better. This last split into further problems: a) Life is life, and since I'm not God I can't really figure out how to improve on it and still suss out its truth; and b) I haven't found a novel all that easy to sell so I don't know what the hell they're talking about.

A deeper reason: That constant voice in my head, saying, Why do you think anyone wants to read about you? What can I say? Maybe I used up all my courage in the aftermath of the suicide: the voice won out.

The activities I engaged in instead may have been diversions, but they still required risk and perseverance: I continued fine-tuning and marketing my novel and renamed it yet again. I got situated in my new community and started a new writing group. After a particularly vivid dream suggested a viable story arc I began a young adult novel. I supported the goals of my fellow writers by chairing one writers conference, for which I maintained a biweekly blog, and contributed time to the smooth running of another. I consider all of that meaningful work. My point is I made different choices—choices that didn't seem relevant to the theme of this blog.

Writing about it now, I wonder if there might have been one more factor putting off the memoir. Did you see that little clause up in the third paragraph: "while at the lake this year I truly missed Ron for the first time"? It sure caught my attention. To avoid miring my memoir with angry rant, I required the distance of time and perspective. Maybe I just wasn't ready yet.

Now, ready or not, here I come. When I showed up to restart this blog in my last post I asked if the universe was listening. It was an answer more than a question: the universe asked the question of me first. In my next post, I'll share the incident that ended my waffling and returned me to the task of writing my memoir in earnest.

Instant clarity

In my last post I promised to share the reason why I returned to my memoir project.

On August 30 I was up at our lake house, typing away on a young adult novel about a sixteen-year-old boy who seems to be the only one who sees something in his grandfather's odd behavior beyond a neon sign flashing "Alzheimer's", and is willing to bust him out of a locked memory ward to find the answers.

*Ding*: I had mail.

The note was from Deirdre, Ron's first wife. Deirdre and I became pen pals for one extraordinary reason: in the early months after Ron's suicide, she reached out to the widow and young children left behind by the husband she had quit so long ago. In one amazing handwritten letter after another, Deirdre offered me the one thing I couldn't possibly conjure for myself: context. To all appearances, Ron's suicide was in direct answer to my intention to divorce him, and to that notion Deirdre's precious gift of backstory created an emergency roadblock: as I moved forward, any access to the path of guilt would be denied.

The reason for Deirdre's August 30th e-mail: after a full year of symptoms, she had been diagnosed with ALS, better known as Lou Gehrig's disease.

The one and only time I met Deirdre face-to-face, several years ago (an event memorialized in the photo, above—Deirdre is on the right), it seemed that I was the one with the big life challenges. She had a happy late-life marriage and a touch of sciatica. Then BAM. It doesn't get a whole lot more challenging than ALS. Like any story with an epic cast, life is a continual compounding of scenes in which our roles are always changing.

Because of my experience with Ron I wasted only a few minutes dispensing the coulda-shoulda-wouldas. Instead I focused on the parameters of our relationship: she lived in South Carolina, I lived in Pennsylvania, and our time was limited. How could I best use that time to honor what she'd meant to me?

And I thought, what if it were me? What if I had drawn the ALS card, and only had a limited amount of time to keep writing? Would I keep working on this YA novel I enjoyed, that would have some emotional resonance and that I might even be able to sell, or would I write the memoir that will surely help me construct context and meaning from the chaotic events of my life?

I returned to the memoir the next day and have not allowed that voice that insists on second-guessing me to again gain purchase.

Here's why: whether other readers will be interested in my life or not is no longer my concern. Deirdre is my audience. My audience of one. In my return e-mail, I told her as much.

She wrote back:

You are such a funny bunny. You want "desperately to do something meaningful" while you are here on this earth and you have, my dear, you have. Think of those lovely boys/men you raised in the midst of a murky, twisted marriage with an emotionally stunted person. I could never have done that, never!

If Deirdre only knew how much she had to do with that. Her letters freed up energy I might have spent beating myself up so that I might best help my sons get through the ordeal of the suicide's aftermath.

I mean to tell her. As a way of honoring the huge gift she gave me 13 years ago, with that series of letters she has given me permission to reproduce, I am writing that memoir.

And since she's on a deadline, so am I.

One more thing. While Deirdre and I are both big readers, I learned from her bookshelves that time we met that our tastes are are quite different: I am an omnivorous reader, Deirdre is not.

She likes the truth, hard up and artfully expressed.

The only genre she reads is memoir.

Revivification

Hello blank page, I'm back. (Is the universe listening?)

Nothing like reviving one's blog with one of those words that's so long you must pull it apart syllable by syllable to figure out it's meaning, right? Re-vi-vi-fi-ca-tion. Welcome to my world, for that's what a writer does to breathe new life into her work: pulls apart words and sentences and paragraphs and scenes, constantly questioning their components for meaningful expression and relevant inclusion.

As my temporarily abandoned readers already know, I have used this blog to explore the way writing helps us address issues of healing. Life questions that got me journaling instigated that journey for me some eighteen years ago; my first husband's suicide spurred it on.

The 13th anniversary of Ron's suicide was yesterday. Because Dave and I moved to Doylestown last December, this is the first anniversary of Ron's death I did not spend on the farm where he killed himself after a day-long police standoff. I thought I'd commemorate the anniversary by powering up this blog again.

Truth be told, I've missed writing about my life. A memoirist uses perspective like a sieve: you drop in the events of your life, shake them around, and allow the drab to fall through so that you might more closely examine the bits that glitter with meaning. I'll show you what I mean by applying that same process to my blog.

Sifting back through my last several posts, I saw some sparkle of meaning beyond that which I purposefully applied to the page.

Sunday, March 22: Blessed detachment

Monday, March 30: Scene and Sequel

These two posts exemplify the yin and yang of my writer's life. Networking/holing up, crafting/learning, reflecting/living, dreaming/enacting, producing/marketing, responsibility to others/responsibility to self: these sets of dueling needs are a fertile source of conflict in the life of the writer who's in it for the whole wild ride. Just when I've figured out how to tame my schedule to encourage that elusive notion of consistency, one of these duels heats up to wreak havoc. Turns out we are all characters in an unpredictable story. Hallelujah!

Saturday, June 6: While I was underground

Writer or not, if you plan to live fully, you must play the game in a ready stance—you know, like in tennis: knees bent, weight over the balls of the feet, racket at the ready, eyes scanning the horizon for opportunity and peril, weight shifting back and forth to propel you in the direction of the next shot. You gotta try. But watch: it's often when you're fully committed to your forehand that you'll feel the ball zing past your backhand side. This feels unfair—I was ready!—but such reversals are a necessary part of a great story.

Saturday, September 19: What he left behind

Our legacies will define us for future generations. Ron left a legacy of shock and horror. If I choose to write it, my memoir can leave a legacy of perspective and hope. The written word trumps the echo of trauma, paper over rock. For me this post also exemplifies the energy required to boost myself beyond the forces that could have kept me in orbit around a traumatic event. In terms of personal growth, that is rocket science.

Monday, September 28: The illusion of control

Healing is not "getting a grip": it's the opposite. Healing, for me, has been reassembling that flexible ready stance I mentioned above, body part by body part, and regaining the heart to face whatever comes at me next.

Thursday, October 8: The stories behind the stories, Part 1

Tragedy need not define my life. My role as dance critic defined my relationship with a larger community even as the foundation of Ron's life crumbled beneath him—on the very day of the suicide standoff, for example, my editor at The Morning Call was awaiting a story I was writing on choreographer David Parsons in conjunction with his upcoming performance at Lehigh University.

Saturday, July 10: My lemon crosses America

The blog posts and essays and book-length material that comprise my memoir work, with its theme of how to carry on in the face of tragedy, is as serious as it gets—yet to become whole again one must honor one's whimsical side. Her move across the country was very stressful for my sister, but documenting the lemon's journey was a running gag that afforded much in the way of healing laughter. I can even find meaning in the choice of a lemon to exemplify my sister's journey: its sour taste doesn't mean it isn't good for you.

Forehand or backhand, ready or not, meaning whizzes past us every day. Writing about my life allows me to capture it on the page so I can mine the little stories for the big over-arching story. Finding the structure in that bigger story is in itself healing; what once seemed random is now architecture.

Please check back often, as I hope to update this blog three times per week. In my next post I'll explore why I temporarily stopped writing about my life.

Origami Memories

I knew that writing a memoir would be a healing experience. The notion of fashioning chaotic detail into a beginning, middle and end sounded soothing already.  Plus there's the forward thrust: a memoir is a survival story, after all. But I have already journaled the story of my first husband's choice to shoot himself and my choice to stay and raise our sons on the same farm where he committed this act, and I have told it verbally time and again through the past 11 years. Is there added magic in writing a book about it?

There is for me. To show what the writing has been like for me, I must switch to the present tense; it is an ongoing process.

***

Ron's suicide feels as though I've been pushed from an airplane. I'd first boarded this plane to reach a destination; I had never intended to bail. Just as Ron's death is not entirely without foreshadowing, neither is my exit. I have heard the whisper: "I might soon push you out that door." But even though I know it might happen I have no idea what it will be like until I am falling and the air rushing past extracts all that was "me." 

I hit hard and plunge into a deep river. My first thought: I am alive! Second thought: I can do this, I know how to swim. But I can't find the surface; I am submerged and surrounded by bubbles and I can't tell which way is up. The only thing I can think to do is kick fiercely. I finally break through to the surface, where at last I can draw huge gulps of life-sustaining air. I tread with my legs and scream my story for all to hear, over and over, it's all I can do. "I am here!" The river is icy cold but at this point I don't even feel it, I'm numb, and while I can now tell up from down I cannot see the shore. The current tugs at me. What I've been through is bad enough, what if there's a waterfall ahead? I don't know where I'm heading but I set off anyway, across the current, intuiting that swimming is exactly what I should be doing.

The river is so wide I am swimming for years, but each stroke is purposeful and my body is growing strong and I have a new sense of who I am. I am one who swims.

Eventually the water is shallow enough that I can touch bottom. It feels strange to once again stand on my feet, although I know I am not yet healed; full immersion in this water is still necessary to hold me up. But I find others here, in the shallows, including a new mate who doesn't care that my hair is slick with river scum and that I still take to shivering. I can enjoy his company while understanding the journey is still mine to complete. Through the water I continue, sometimes swimming, sometimes slogging on foot, occasionally tossing in a playful dive. I am closing in on shore.

Now that I've reached the edge I am sometimes able to leave the water for days at a time. As much as I'd love to forget about the river I sense a danger in doing so, so I am never far from the shore. I will always return to wade in, or at least dip a toe.

After years of flirting with the water's edge it is time to write. For this I must go down to the river and sit on its bottom, immersing myself in the shallows. Here I recall the cold wet slap of experience at the same time the rhythmic lapping of the water against my legs soothes me. I feel the pull of the water and must remind myself: I am alive, I am strong, and I am free. To create this memoir I need only sit here for a few hours each day, I can dip in for another swim if I need a deeper taste or I can leave altogether; I am well acquainted with this shore and can do as I please. What I choose to do is to set the story I know so well onto paper. 

The first-this-then-that of it soon drains me; I've been here before. I don't want to tell again in the same way, I want to write-and-build, create something new. I start to pull my narrative apart and create little scenes. Honing them requires that I take a few steps back to see a bigger picture (I could not have done this while swimming). I fold the story this way and that, its surfaces creating new pairings, new pairings suggesting new meanings. As I perfect each scene I inch out of the water until I am standing at the very edge of the river, almost detached from that part of my experience. How freeing! I need not bore my reader with my journal entries, or drag her to the middle of the river to drown in my experience. My story is pliable; I can hold it in my hand and work it to create depth and breadth until its scenes build something new and just as true. Like an origami boat fashioned from the pages of my story it will be independent of me. And when it's finished, I'll be able to take this new rendering down to the river and set it afloat, where I can send it out to others.

Only then, having wrought all possible meaning out of my unintended nosedive, will I be free to stand, choose a new direction, and walk away.

Reaching out through memoir

Roger stood on the shore of the lake and dug a toe in the sand. He was a lifelong friend, a loving family man, and as a vigorous fundamentalist, was known to lose no opportunity to proselytize for Christ. It had been a year since my first husband committed suicide and Roger hadn't even sent me a card. I was pretty sure this was because he thought my husband had taken a shortcut to hell, but unlike some others he kept this sentiment to himself. He simply said, "I just didn't know what to say." 

I thought of the card his parents sent me, which in its first two words seemed to say it all: "Oh Kathy."

I suggested to Roger that an expression like "I'm so sorry, I don't know what to say" would have been welcomed, but that I understood. All death is difficult, suicide even more so. The suicide of someone you knew and liked calls into question everything you think you knew about life.

I'm glad Roger and I were able to have that conversation; in a few short years he would be dead at the age of 46 from multiple myeloma, a cancer rarely treatable. Experience had taught me not to put off my expressions of concern for his difficult situation. I kept up contact, and drove to see him at the beautiful home he'd designed and built for his family. When I got there he was lying on the bed in his room. He had tumors the size of walnuts on his cheek and chest. He was hurting; he and his wife were weighing the struggle of getting him down the stairs against the hope that more radiation therapy might shrink the ever-growing tumors enough to relieve some pain. I was able to reach over his bed and hold him in my arms and press my hand to his bald head just days before his passing. I'll never forget what he whispered in my ear: "Oh Kathy."

To date I have never known a writer to be struck dumb by tragedy. I think all writers have an appreciation for tough life situations, because they are the stuff of great story. I sensed this at the recent Philadelphia Writers' Conference, which offered a class on memoir. As fellow attendees asked questions, bits and pieces of our stories leaked out, creating a pool of compassion that connected us as a community. Stories of growing up poor in tough neighborhoods, of child sexual abuse, of difficult health challenges—we had all been dealt tough circumstances, faced them down, and carried on. After hearing that my boys and I had lived through a full day standoff at our farm the day Ron killed himself, more than one approached to say, "I can't imagine what you went through."

No one can imagine what we went through. That's why I'm setting down my story. Others imagine the horrors, but I can help them move beyond them—the way we did. We survived and are striving to create meaning and are reaching for glory. I believe in memoir because we create community by witnessing pain, but also because our healing journeys should be shared. 

I can't imagine what the others in that memoir class went through, either—and I can't wait to read about it. In sharing our stories, we feel less profoundly alone.

Retreat

I can't think of any form of healing that doesn't make use of retreat. Retreat is not cowardice; it is a wise reallocation and renewal of resources. Let's face it: sometimes it's just too much to heal the body and feed the spirit while waging the battles of everyday life. Through retreat we can protect and restore the sacred.

I just got back from a solo writing retreat at our summer home in the foothills of the Adirondacks in northern New York state. See the left-hand corner of the camp in the picture above—not the porch, but the corner behind and to the left of the porch steps, framed on the right and left by six-foot vertical windows? That's where I set up my computer—on a writing desk angled across those windows. Next to the window on my right was the wood-burning fireplace that kept me warm during my seven chilly days alone (the windowless vertical element is its chimney). I was working on a memoir about how my sons—just eight and ten at the time—and I healed after my first husband's suicide. 

It's been ten years since Ron pulled the trigger at the end of a full-day standoff at the pastoral farm where I still live. The massive police presence signaled the media to turn his personal hell into headline news, complete with a handy aerial map of how to find our house. I declined a reporter's request to comment at the time. I did not yet know what to say. Since then, events have accumulated that suggest a beginning-middle-end to the arc of our story, and I am ready to make public comment.

Why do that, when the scandalized memoir market is sagging, fewer people are reading, I have no celebrity to create interest, and the economy is driving the book publishing industry into a deeper slump? I write because I was a writer before it happened, and I am a writer still, and this is what writers do: we identify good stories and tell them. I cannot control commercial success, I can only show up to fulfill the purpose of my life. The alternative was illustrated for my sons and I all too graphically. I must sort through the chaos and find meaning; it is my way.

Work on the first draft hums along when I am into it, but once I break away, re-entry can be almost physically painful, and I can be quite creative in finding ways to avoid sitting down to the work. My solution was to get away for a week and dive in.

The total: I was able to write 39,329 words in seven days, roughly 143 pages. My highest daily total was 7,126 words—I've had higher daily totals in a former NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) contest, but never on a topic this draining.

The danger in immersing yourself so deeply in traumatic events of the past, of course, is losing touch with the buffer of time—and that's what made my location so magical. All I had to do was look off to the left to see a loon bob to the lake surface with a fish in its mouth or a mallard and his mate fly toward our beach and skid in for a comical landing; to the right I could see a great blue heron soar over the water with its crooked neck and six-foot wingspan, or watch a red-headed woodpecker shop for dinner on a majestic pine. Thanks to a new Adirondacks-happy cell plan, I was only moments away from all of my boys: the two college-age ones and my wonderful Dave, whose love and support for my life's work and healing allow such retreat.

Do you need to retreat? If so, add a comment. I hope to open this magical place to other writers by organizing Writing Partner Retreats on long weekends. I can already sense the fire-warmed camaraderie, smell the buttered popcorn, and feel the power of the amazing stories we'll share...