I want, no, I need to share this excerpt from the book I’m using. Even as I sit here writing this, I feel my eyes moistening. I hope you will see why this has touched my heart and maybe why God lead me to the very book to use in my 365 day journey.

“Robin Romm worried whether to publish the memoir she had written about the last three weeks of her mother’s life. She wrote thirty pages of notes during those weeks, then ninety pages in the ten days after her mother died. Romm felt there were more reasons not to write a memoir than to write it, and asked herself the questions many of us struggle with: “Will people think I am using a tragedy for personal gain? Would my mother like being portrayed sick in a book? Is it a trespass to tell other people’s stories? What right did I have to them? Will I be disowned? Will critics be mean? Will some petty blogger go, ‘Egads, another cancer book!’ I could fill a page with these questions.”

“But then she read her mother’s journals and came across an entry in which her mother, who was an attorney, wrote that she felt her sphere of influence had been so small in this world. “And I had a moment of thinking,” says Romm, “that maybe her story, my story, our story, would find its way into the hands of others in the middle of a tragedy, or those trying to help someone in tragedy’s clutches. That this story —so small, really, just a mother’s death —might have the power to be more universal.””

“I felt what I felt and I knew what I felt and I wrote what I felt.” —ROBIN ROMM

I have felt for a long time that I needed to write Mari’s story. At first, I thought it would be more of a biography/autobiography. I got the idea while Mari was still alive in the hospital that maybe I could write her story. But then God showed me the real story He wanted me to write which is the memoir of what happened those 16 days while in the hospital before she died to the few days after to include the wake and funeral. Then include a chapter of how I am today.

I see Mari’s story as being one to help others as they go through their own hard times and tragedies, especially those where you lose someone with the hardest ones being the lose of a child. When Mari died there weren’t any I could find. It was more of the self-help kind. However, although I didn’t realize until later, the kind of book that helped me the most was reading someone else journey of loss that paralleled mine. It struck me right to my core. In that moment I knew Mari’s story would help others as the one had done for me.