In life sometimes there are things we want to do so bad, and then we start to do them only to find that about two-thirds to three-fourths of the way through what we are doing isn’t anything like we’d thought it’d be. As a result, we realize we need to stop without finishing. Has this ever happened to you before in your life?
It has with me, only I realized this when I had completed the full first draft of Mari’s book. The book I’d written was a complete biography of Mari’s life as well as some autobiography about me and what lead up to having my husband and my daughter. What I came to figure out over time after reading several critiques from different people that unless you are some well-known person like Princess Diana or Billy Graham that no one is going to want to ready your biography/autobiography. Instead, I’d need to write a memoir about a specific time. This is what would draw in the reader more than anything else.
Then it dawned on me. The book was all wrong. Don’t get me wrong. It was very cathartic and healing to have written it as it was down over about a two-year period after Mari passed away. I believe what God slowly showed me is that I needed to take what happened with her in the hospital and turn that into a memoir. That the very updates I’d written for family and friends to keep them abreast of what was happening during that time would now become the very notes I’d need for the memoir as those were the first hand accounts of what had happened. They were better than my memory could ever have been because as time goes by you begin to forget those little details that can make the story come to life that much more.
I remember thinking how very important it was I got everything written down. And the day that comes to mind the most was her last day alive on this earth. July 16. I remember sitting up in the bedroom we occupied in my husband‘s mom and dad’s house for about three months after she passed. It was only a couple of days after and I began to write that last day. Through immense tears and heartache I typed out those memories for what had happened.
My husband came up one time and saw the ever flowing tears and told me to stop. Said I didn’t need to do this right now. I told him that yes I did. If I had waited I’d forget things. I couldn’t explain the urgency with which I had to get them down but I did. It took me three days to get them all written down. And now I look back and can see how God had been urging me on to get them down. He knew I’d need those updates to later write her memoir. Think about that for a moment. Talk about God working in mysterious way. In the end He showed me what I needed to do and how to move forward with Mari’s story. I’ve been blessed.
