This Heroine’s Journey

When Daryl was diagnosed with colon cancer, we were at a writer's conference in Florida. I was excited to have received a scholarship, and to have been admitted into a workshop with a Bestselling Crime Writer. Two days into the conference, he went to the ER and our life turned completely upside down. Our American Girl + British Guy Rom Com, was blown to bits and became a devastating melodrama. Even worse, it was following the Hero's Journey narrative structure, one I pushed against for most of my life as a writer. Now, I could see it with absolute clarity. I didn't know if cancer was our Call to Adventure or The Initiation, but just like every other deer-in-headlights protagonist, we were not ready.

Much of the conference focused on structure and dramatic arcs--the question of "Why this moment? Why this day?" as a key to writing fiction. Suddenly, fiction seemed like an unnecessary mask when life itself was so wildly and terribly alive. What started as dramatic play had evolved into survival.

Once Daryl was feeling better and we had a plan of action on how we would get back home to Virginia, he encouraged me to go back to the conference. The last day of the workshop was the discussion of my novel excerpt, and I didn’t want to miss it. The Bestselling Crime Writer had extremely positive things to say, and I felt that warm glow of feeling seen as a crime writer. Others in the class chimed in with their excitement about my characters, the world I was building. While I nodded and scrawled notes on the back of my manuscript, I marveled at the macabre humor of the universe. Of course I’d have the best workshop of my life on the day after the worst day of my life. Maybe I was dead and this was my purgatory: St. Petersburg, Florida at a writing conference.  

Later that night, I packed up our hotel room, lugged our huge suitcases down to the borrowed sedan Daryl's wonderful friend, George, brought to us from Tampa, and drove to the hospital. The leathery smell of the car interior reminded me of my grandmother’s car, the comfort I felt when she would pick me up from school and we’d drive home singing along to the radio. It was a short-lived feeling, as my reality was mirroring the recurring logistical nightmares that had plagued me for years. In these nightmares, we were always rushing for a flight, being kicked out of a hotel, packing without enough suitcases our things in plastic bags, a confused check-out time. My life felt completely not my own as I drove another person’s car though another person’s city to a hospital named after St. Anthony, the patron saint of lost things. 

When I arrived, Daryl was chatty, happy, looking like his normal self, just in a hospital bed. For a few minutes, I let myself pretend we were here for something solvable, like appendicitis,. I set up a makeshift space for myself in the recliner next to his hospital bed and cried as I read him the glowing words written on my novel manuscript. He got out of the bed and hugged me close,”At least something good has happened while we were here.”  

I slept that night on the pull out recliner next to his bed in a strange state of happy and sad. I did not want to hand victory to the part of me that shivered whenever Daryl threw caution to the wind and said, “What’s the worst that could happen?” The part of me who looked beneath every bit of good luck for the bad, the payback, the Rumpelstiltskin demanding payment. 

I could not see beyond the hospital room, could not imagine what our life was going to look like or how many days of it we had left (636 days). It felt like I was a wind-up doll and there was a key turning deep inside of me, everything inside me was shifting. 

My novel, my potential success as a writer and Daryl’s mortality were now entwined. The part of me who hesitated before fully jumping into happiness was 100% correct: A good thing does not come for free, it will always be followed with the bad. 

Daryl was a writer, too, wrote insightful movie reviews and magazine articles. We talked about our favorite movies and novels, watched hours of television and dissected plot points and characters. More importantly, he helped me with my writing in big and small ways, encouraged me to go back to grad school and kept a job he did not love to help support us. He was the one who told me I needed to take apart my novel, who sat with me on the floor of our office with pages of it stacked and moving around to help me understand its peaks and valleys, to simplify it and to understand what I was trying to say. 

After he died in October 2020, I received the edits from my agent. With all my heart, I wanted to be able to push through and make the edits, but grief destabilized me. I tried and I failed and could not connect in the same way. The main reason the novel was complete was because I wanted to show Daryl I could do it.  I realized I was mad the novel had outlived Daryl and would never be read by him. 

Writing has always been by my side. It is also the part of myself I have tried to protect the most, to keep separate from the drudge of day-to-day life and jobs and all the things that slowly suck away our dreams. 

Grief turned me upside down and stole my love of fiction.

Once, when we were living in a dumpier apartment, Daryl called me at work because smoke was filling the hallways and he could hear firetrucks outside. Without thinking, I said “Get my laptop.” Later, he expressed somewhat joking that I didn’t think of him first. Of course I did, but he could escape, my first novel was on that laptop. 

During and following those 636 days, writing became a form of survival. If I didn’t write down what we were going through, I could not process it and could not have been fully and emotionally present. Everything I was writing was either journal entries or in essay form. I couldn’t stop writing about what had happened to him, to us. There are moments from Daryl’s last year and a half that break me to read, but there are also glimmering bits of him that are alive on those pages. There is also a version of me that only existed for those 636 days, a me who made it through the gauntlet, who was tested, had the person who meant the most to her in the universe taken away, who went into the abyss and was transformed. 

I had to let the novel go (let it lie, I told myself). Almost four years later, I feel a nudge to go back to it. The loss of my love is now tied up with it, too, but I am learning how to be gentler with my expectations of myself, to know that surviving, keeping myself and our dog alive, is all I had to do the last several years.

This version of me has to accept that not everything I started with is still with me, but may also come back. This version of me can also learn to say, “What’s the worst that can happen?” and not feel she is tempting fate.