When I handed the medical transcriptionist the Ziploc bag containing eight micro-cassettes, she gave me the raised index finger, “Wait a sec, I’ll be right back,” sign.

“We’ll have to get the machine out of the back closet, but I think we can find someone to get these done for you.”

I’d been dictating hospice memories into a hand-held Dictaphone for the last fifteen years. Stop lights, waiting at drive thru's, sitting in the park; I burned to document these stories because no one I knew wanted to hear me talk about them.  I eased my ego by telling myself that everyone is too busy, but the truth was that almost everyone was afraid to hear what they perceived would be horrible stories about pain and suffering. I realized that no one wanted to talk about dying or death. No one wanted to understand why I sometimes wept when I saw a father holding a daughter, or when I witnessed two very old people laughing, or the specific reason I yelled at two women as they complained incessantly while they stood in line at the grocery store. My friends and family simply assumed my Latin heritage made me “overly emotional and demonstrative.”

But that wasn’t the reason.

The emotions were triggered by memories; countless lessons learned from the beauty, the tragedy, the undecorated rawness of pure love. The stripped bare examples of love in all it’s forms. Even when it wasn’t pretty.

So, I decided to take a year off of working full time. I took the copious transcription (I never realized I said, “Um,” so often) and shaped them into a journal that I anticipated my attorney would give to my three children after I died. After all, they were profoundly affected by my life as I served the dying. I was on-call two or three nights a week, and sometimes it made me a very weary mom.

I hired a retired English professor to keep my tenses, punctuation, and grammar in check. Then I sat. And sat. A fifteen pound weight gain, and a realization that I am not a solitary creature, were two of the good and bad aspects of sitting and writing.

A dear friend who was dating James Patterson’s first literary agent, sat on my couch reading the first spiral-bound copy of my hospice memoir, and quietly “borrowed” it for her lover to read. He generously sent it to a famous editor, and she was extraordinarily kind, offering to help me get the manuscript in shape.  Working constantly, fixated, obsessed and running on adrenaline and fear, I completed the thousands of questions, corrections, and requests.

A book coach, two editors and six beta readers later, I had a story I was proud to share with the world. I was the voice that had to share the lend of life experiences of these twenty-one patients I served.



After seventy-seven rejections to my query, many of them writing, “ I hate to pass up this precious gem, but it’s just not what we could sell….”  

Undaunted, I found She Writes Press through fellow author Pamela Webber. She’s brilliant, everyone!  She and I attended the Algonquian Writers Conference last year and sensing she was a detail freak, I took her lead to join SWP.