When the piles of snow outside my window finally melt here in Rhode Island and the crocuses dare to show their little purple and yellow heads, it will be seven years since I began writing my memoir, Breathe. Seven years. They say God created the whole world in much less time, but I guess he did that before he was a parent. For many years the only compositions I wrote were my annual holiday letters, which were guaranteed to arrive in the mailboxes, now in-boxes, of my family and friends anytime between Christmas and Easter. And while some encouraging recipients often asked me when I was going to write a book, there was also the resigned voice of my mother saying with a sigh, “You’re such a gifted writer, it’s such a shame you never did anything with it.” “Hey,” I’d counter, scribbling yet another teacher’s note for one of my kids, “I write every day!”

If this sounds familiar, or if you’re trying to live your own writing dream while raising your family or are otherwise interested in what the seven-year journey behind my book entailed, find a cozy spot, sit back, and read on. It’s not a short story--seven years rarely is--so I’ll tell you all about it in two parts, starting here.

They say you have to write the story that wants to be written, and after the real-life events recounted in my memoir transpired, I knew this was that story. And when I’d added the exclamation point to the end of our family by giving birth to my seventh child, Bella, I was ready to begin the process of birthing that story, which I thought of as Naptime. While my other four kids were at school and Bella napped in the afternoons, on most days I resisted the temptation to crawl in beside her, forcing my ass into my office chair instead. Figuring I needed the old college deadline, I set for myself the goal of completing my book in time to mark the tenth anniversary of our son Noah’s death on August 10, 1997. Yes, one year plus a few months to tidy things up sounded completely attainable when I began. By then it had been about ten years since the story timeline started, the opening scene being Noah’s birth on May 18, 1996. It was Easter of 2006, which seemed like a good time for resurrections. 

The first thing I realized was that I had to begin with the end. The final scenes of the story recount our medical malpractice trial for the death of our other son, Jonah, so my first task was to transcribe the trial. Why? Because, lucky me, our courtroom had the technological innovation of being videotaped instead of using a stenographer. For many months, I sat in front of our VCR with my notebooks and pens and wrote, word for word, every bit of testimony from seven full days in court, wishing I’d taken a course in stenography myself. My kids would come home from school to find me seated in front of the TV, stopping, rewinding, and starting the seven VCR tapes over and over again, until I was finished. By then, it had been four years since the trial, so this exercise served as a good refresher. And when I finally pressed the stop button for the last, blessed time, I turned to my computer and began transcribing them all over again. 

That done, I searched through cupboards, closets, and storage bins until I’d found all the baby books, photo albums, calendars, journals, sympathy cards, newspaper clippings, church bulletins, bills, receipts, and birth, death and medical records from the five-year span of story time, researching and reliving those events over and over until they, too, were fresh in my head and in my heart. And I learned the absolute truth of the saying, The heart remembers what the mind forgets. One of the many things I unearthed in the process were notes I’d taken at a Compassionate Friends conference for bereaved parents that my husband and I had attended in 1999. There I’d asked a well-known grief writer, “How long should you wait to write your story?” Never one for numbers, I’d recalled her answering “five” and had felt for a few years by then that I was getting a late start. But in my notes, I discovered she’d actually said, “You should wait five years to tell it, but ten years to write it.” So, I was right on track.

In November of that year, Andy and I went with friends on a sailing trip to Martinique and we were all relaxing on deck after my 45th birthday dinner when my friend told me I should make a birthday wish. I was still nervous about saying I was writing a memoir, as I hadn’t told anyone yet, but the stars winked their encouragement and the tropical air wrapped me in a blanket of comfort, so I blurted out, “My wish for my birthday is to publish the book I’m writing.” Nobody said a word, so I figured I’d better have a back-up plan, adding, “Um, and to see a sea turtle.” The next day we were snorkeling when I swam ahead of the group and there, just in front of me, I saw a beautiful hawksbill turtle breaststroking along. I screamed through my snorkel as the turtle turned its head and looked at me with a round, soulful eye and I received my birthday blessing, happy that I’d added a wish that could be so quickly granted. My other wish, as you know, would take much longer.

One year later, as my college deadline loomed on the calendar, I had still only just begun to fathom the proverbial mountain I’d set out to climb. Instead of reading my published book, I celebrated the tenth anniversary of Noah’s death in August 2007 with my family by hiking a real mountain, Mt. Carter, in the White Mountains of NH. When I reached that summit, I buried my unrealistic deadline, along with a few of my son’s ashes, and realized that writing was like hiking: I was just going to have to take it step by step.

Having completed my crash course in stenography and historical research, when I finally sat down to begin writing the story of my sons, what came swimming out of my fingertips were six pages about salmon. Did I mention that I’m a fish biologist? And when I got to “The End” for the first time, the manuscript was over 500 pages long, raw and uncut, was entitled Shoveling Sand, and contained not one scene or sentence of dialogue, except what I’d transcribed from the trial. I was beginning to understand that I needed help learning how to craft a story. I wrote to fellow Rhode Islander and author, Ann Hood, and at her recommendation, in July 2008 I went to my first writing conference. There, on the shores of Lake Atitlan in Guatemala, Ann told me, “This story needs to be told and you need to tell it,” and Joyce Maynard said, “You sound angry; start over.” 

Stay tuned for Part 2 of my story!