Poetic License

Just over a week ago, I took vacation. Part of me wanted to go do some things while I was off work, but the part that won is the part that wanted to write. It was a little more than a week with not a lot going on, and I seized upon it!

Because I didn’t want to become mired in edit mode, which can sometimes happen to me, I decided to start on Part 3 of my memoir, which is the part in which I discuss the more recent period of my life. I wrote about the time in which I found the lump in my breast and the brutal treatment I went through. Though I’m not yet done with Part 3, I wrote 16,000 words. In my template, that’s 54 pages, double-spaced. Given that I wrote for six days of my vacation and took the other days to visit with my son, relax, and watch a few things on television, that is 4,000 words per day. How I went from scarcely writing at all to 4,000 words a day is beyond me.

But let me tell you–it was the best week I’ve had in forever. It was more rewarding than if I had spent a ton of money on a trip. I don’t need to recover from this vacation. Instead, it has energized me. I want to continue to write in the evenings–not every evening, but most. I would love to finish this manuscript by Labor Day.

Of course, these 54 pages are not the sum total of what I’ve written. My book is in three parts: Stephanie, Women, and Cancer (not necessarily the titles of each section). Most of my work has been done in Part 1, with some additional work in Part 2. The third part was virgin territory, which is why I decided to start there. Fresh, blank pages. Part 1 concerns the time from which my beloved daughter died until I went to North Carolina (the first time) to meet Denise. But it also concerns everything that led up to Stephanie’s death. Part 2 is when I left home and didn’t return. It contains all of the madness of being in a relationship with Denise and everyone that came after her. And then Part 3 is when my body tried to detonate itself.

It’s a book about grieving.

When talking with my son about the book, what little I’ve said to anyone, I described the sections as I just did for you. He looked puzzled and asked, “So how do the women relate to your grief?”

Oh dear boy. Stephanie’s death showed me just how short life could be. I decided to break out of the tension of trying to keep a marriage going while knowing that I’m gay. And my grief made me vulnerable to some women who were very bad for me. In Part 3, then, I had to decide whether or not I wanted to keep living, despite my grief, through a very bad cancer.

My working title is The Way Through. It’s how I look at my life and how it was impacted by protracted and profound grief. Complicated grief. Guilt. Self-hatred. How did I get through it? I just put one foot in front of the other.

If you think that sounds simplistic, you’re right. It was much more than just a day at a time, a step at a time. Some days could find me going back and forth between excitement at living my life and trying new things or being flat in bed, sobbing my eyes out, at least for the first few years. But there were plenty of times when all I could do is deal with each hour between waking and sleeping. I’m grateful to my job for giving me something meaningful to do, and for friends who went to lunch or to coffee with me. Friends who got me out for a night of music or movies. There weren’t many of those outings, but they always seemed to show up when I needed them most.

Not a day passes that I don’t think of Stephanie. She’s in everything I do, every concert I go to, everything I do around my house. I will never stop missing her, but if my book makes one mother feel seen, feel less alone, or feel better equipped to deal with a difficult child, then it’s worth the work I’m putting in, worth all the blood I’m pouring on the pages.

Namaste,

Jude