When I tell people the crux of my story is about losing a friend in childhood, I get some awkward looks.
But the thing is, through the next 20 years I got to think about it from a lot of angles.
Life just wasn’t going to be predictable.
As a young adult, I lost my grandparents. In my 30s, I lost a fetus. My first pregnancy. I made this video to remember her:
Pink is for Monica from Design Kompany
Then I lost a close friend, only a year older than me, late in 2010. The next year meant really coming to terms—with every one of the deaths. My back started hurting and I couldn’t stand straight. People told me I might have to get surgery. But I ignored them, because I’m the kind of person who does the opposite of what people tell me. I started yoga, and acupuncture, and a lot of reorganizing of the shelves of my mind. Along the way, I met a few of “my people.”
It’s taken a while to find them.
Stuff’s been in the way. Lingering echoes of youth had been troublesome. Piercing verbal assaults from teenhood from my mother, growing up, got in the way of helping me find a calm, quiet spot to reflect. I was annoyed that it took a full decade of being on the other side of the Atlantic and the other coast of the US to gain the distance needed to, well, grow distant. Now that my mother’s influence is for all practical purposes negligible (I would say less than .2%), I am able to focus on constructing my own thoughts more clearly. More fully. More provocatively.
Hence the memoir.
Death has a way of tricking you into seeing something you wouldn’t expect. That life is beautiful, actually. That there was more to enjoy about it than there was to lament. If, that is, you were willing to look at things that way.
My memoir is in its fourth draft. I took that step of sending it to a publisher, and got it back, intact, and a note saying, “not for us.” Still, the act of sending it made me feel like some invisible wall’s been crossed. Now I am going to blog in the meanwhile, as I finish the next (and possibly next next) versions and upload after that to Amazon.
What’s it about?
Oh!
Why, death, of course.
