Life gets in the way

We don't all get to keep what we start with.

Soon after I returned from my book tour for Love is the Thread, I experienced a frightening series of dizzy spells.  I started walking my dog Gizmo, using a walking stick to steady myself.  Then, at the end of May, 2012, I had a stroke in my sleep.  The doctors said my blood pressure was so high that I should have died.  I say this not for dramatic effect, but as a statement of fact.

Since then, it has been a long slow road to recovery, one I continue today.  I joke that if I had known it would take so long and cost me so much that was dear to me, had I known all that I have  since lost, I wouldn't have had the stroke in the first place.

My physical therapist recommended I practice my P.T. every day for the rest of my life.  I am home now, after an extended stay at a temporary home of my dear friend where I was able to receive intensive therapy, made possible through family, friends and fans. Mind you, home, resting my head on my own pillow, is no longer the same.  Prior to the stroke, I had been one of the caregivers to my aging parents.  They needed someone there, so now my nephew helps them.  Since living on my own isn't yet within my physical abilities, I now reside with my sister and her husband, and their two small girls.  Home, although redefined, is home.  Part of what makes this home is that although slow to come at times, words remain a constant.  I have written every day since I came home.  My handwriting has changed, from print to script; it's easier to not lift the pen from the page.  I go back over and read what I first wrote, and it's hard to believe it was me, yet the thoughts were there.  I couldn't understand, at the time of my stroke and shortly thereafter, why people treated me with kid gloves.  Now I do.

It turns out, I suffered the stroke because I had undiagnosed diabetes and high blood pressure, both are now under control.  I've spent much of the last eight months, at the time of the post, learning new habits -- like walking a mile or more every day.  In the beginning, I could only stand for a few moments, or manage to write four or five lines.  Now, I have worked up to four or five pages at a sitting.  I try not to compare with the ten or more typed pages I would do before the stroke, because what's the point?  I have come this far, and am ready to live the life I have to its fullest.

Much of what I write, I hand-write in my journal. Much of my work now is on a rough draft for the prequel to Judith, Under the Pomegranate Tree.  I go visit the main character, a young girl named Sarah, and it brings me great pleasure to be revisited by characters.  There was a time when the ones I knew so well, had holes.  Now, where those holes remain, new perspectives abound.

With the help of my writer's group, I am now adding greater detail to those early scribblings.  The other day, I talked to a writer of my acquaintance.  She said that the work I am doing exceeds what every other writer she knows is doing.  "Life gets in the way," she said.

When life did get in the way, I was not alone.  There were many that interceded on my behalf, so many, I can't begin to thank them.  You know who you are, and the depths of my unending gratitude.  I really must thank my publisher, Pearlsong Press, and The Kentucky Foundation for Women.  It is their with their continued support that I not only have Judith, in the last preparations for publication, but also the prequel on the horizon.

I am also grateful that writing is and always has been part of my life.  Sharing stories is the one constant I have.  I can always rely on it.