Can I Still Write?

That’s a question I recently had to answer for myself.

For a while now I’ve been what you would call an ‘empty-nester’, in that my children are raised and I live in an all adult household. You do things very differently when everyone you live with is over 55. The pace is far more relaxed and there is time to indulge in those creative endeavors you only had fleeting time for in the past. For me that’s writing, which is my #1 passion as well as a late life career choice, though I also love crochet, crafts, artwork, and really anything creative. With my current mobility issues I’ve had to give up gardening and walks in the woods and fields, but I have plenty to keep me busy. Writing normally will make up a good part of any day when I am home with no appointments or other pressing items on the agenda. But as much as I love what I do, the family has always come first with me, because otherwise, who or what are we living for?

Over the last 5 years or so, my mother has been battling Vascular Dementia. Anybody who has lived with a loved one who has one of these dreaded memory-robbing diseases knows that it takes a lot of time, effort, and patience to deal with the physical and mental challenges of the condition. I’m very fortunate to have a supportive family in that my 2 adult sons and daughter-in-law worked with me to keep my mother happy and comfortable in the home where she had lived for over 33 years—the home my boys grew up in, the home that is now theirs since 2011. The original plan was to relocate my mother to where I am living now, but that was before we got that diagnosis. That was when as a family we decided that the best thing for my mother was to leave her where she had familiar surroundings, in the midst of family. We were able to keep her there up until her recent death, and that’s something I’m very proud of.

I spent as much time with my mother as I could, several days most weeks. I’d been providing some daycare for my two youngest grandchildren for the past 5 years anyway; first part time on weekdays at my house for the little boy and then almost full time hours at their place once his baby sister came along. I didn’t mind because it allowed my married son and daughter-in-law to both work full time and gave my other son, who was running their household for them, somewhat of a break. While I was there, I kept an eye on my mother, making sure was eating well, that she got showered a couple times a week, and it gave me a chance to assess her general health and attitude. Working with babies, toddlers, and an elderly person who is memory impaired, you have to be on your toes, so no writing got done on those days. I did it willingly with no regrets because they are my family and they needed me, and I had an active role in their lives that needed to be filled. I am very close to my grandkids because of my regular presence in their lives, and I was there to see the changes in my mother first hand. I also often hosted one or all of them on the weekends at my place, and I took my mother to her doctor appointments so that I’d be there to answer any questions. I covered for my older son whenever he had an appointment of his own or just needed a getaway afternoon. I’d do it again in heartbeat.

There were a lot of ups and downs over those years, and sometimes the stress carried over after I got home. The days I devoted to family became non-writing days because it was hard to decompress and think at the same time. I learned to accept that and adjusted my home schedule accordingly, getting help with the housework and things like shopping, and giving up most of the editing I had been doing. Whenever I did have time to sit at the computer, I drastically cut back on much of my online time in checking email and surfing social networking sites to focus more completely on writing. We were doing home renovations for a couple years, which also made things interesting, as well as cutting into the budget. Between the family responsibilities that I faced, the money being spent to make our home easier to live in, and my own increasingly tough time just getting around, conventions and other venues to schmooze with people in the writing business and/or fans were out of the question. Other than regular doctor, dentist, and ophthalmology appointments and some very necessary eyes surgeries back in the spring of 2017, I put off dealing with any health issues that weren’t strictly necessary because I didn’t want to be tied down for any length of time in recovery. The family needed me, so I made myself available to them, writing whenever I could. I still averaged 2 small books and maybe a short story or novella every year.

Writing I found to be especially cathartic through those hectic and sometimes difficult years because it gave me a place to channel the big feelings, and something positive that took me out of my everyday life for a while. My focus was solely on what was going onto the page, in making it the best told story I could manage, and so it was like a mini-vacation. I immersed myself in it, and the everyday world of worries and woe went away for a while. When you’re done for the day, you have something to show for your time and effort, which is a real incentive to getting the fingers back pounding on the keyboard and the mind squarely into the tale the next time you get to sit down in front of that blinking cursor. There was a sense of urgency for me to make the most of every chance I had to write, so regular progress continued to be made. It was also a relief to be able to leave the things that would haunt my waking hours and interrupt my sleep at night behind me for at least a few hours. As before I used to garden to set aside the stress by surrounding myself with nature in its glory, I now write to do the same.

And now my mother is no longer with us. Most of what needed to be dealt with over her passing is done. With one young grandkid doing remarkably well in all-day kindergarten and the other starting school this coming August, they don’t need me involved on any regular basis. Other than going through my mother’s worldly possessions and deciding what to do with whatever is left, much more of my time will be my own again. There’s a sense of closure in it, for while I still spend plenty of time with family, it’s not at the same pace that it had. It’s like leaving a chunk of your life behind when you change jobs, retire, move away, get married or divorced. Those last few years were intense ones for me. Now I can turn my focus back on myself, and where I want my life to go, and what more I can do with myself.

There are things I must do; certainly now is the time to talk to doctors about the mobility issues I have or any further eye surgeries I might need to maintain my vision. I don’t have to plan my appointments around my baby & mom sitting schedules anymore, which makes my life far more simple. And I can write as often as I like, when I like. But the question remains… can I still actually write? Will it be with the same passion and determination I felt when writing was something I crammed in between the other demands on my time and energy?

Grieving is a process, it’s not something you do just until the funeral is over and the friends and relatives go home. In fact it becomes far more intense afterwards because now you are alone and everyone else has moved on to other concerns. Since I was the primary planner on this one, I had little time to write for the first couple weeks. I did manage to knock out a monthly town newsletter column, something I’ve also been doing over the past 5-plus years, but that wasn’t as hard. I had emotions to draw upon. We work a month ahead for lead time, and so I was in early April writing the May column, and May has Mother’s Day. So that’s what I wrote about, my first Mother’s Day without my mother and how strange it is/will be. The challenge after that was, could I go back to fiction writing?

I have a book that is completed and ready to be sent out to the publisher that I just have not been ready to deal with. I have another one in progress that I have maybe 1/3 written, the 6^th volume in an ongoing series of pirate novels that I’m very passionate about and so is the publisher. Doing something with either one at that point seemed to be an overwhelming project; one that I was just not ready to face. It’s not like me to put aside writing for other idle pursuits or to wallow in my own sadness, but I just could not work on either one. So I idled away any free time I had by hanging out online, looking at pictures, posting on the social networking sites, or just lurking in the background waiting to chat with someone. Talk seemed to be what I needed the most, not something to write about that had nothing to do with my current state of mind.

And that began to worry me. What if the magic went to the grave with my mother? I have not had what you would call a writer’s block in the past 9 years that I’ve been so intensely involved in getting my fiction into print. Somehow no matter what was going on in my life at the time, the dams always overflowed and the words still came. This… was not me.

Then I woke up early one morning about 2 weeks into my mother’s passing with a song stuck in my head that I just could not stop thinking about. It had very little to do with her, just a tune from the 70s that I’d long forgotten but now recalled, but the more I thought about it, the more it struck me as the perfect base for a Vagabond Bards tale. Now that was not a storyline I planned on revisiting this year, because I had finished a Vagabond Bards novel in a previous year that got turned in and has not yet seen print. But it was a writing idea, it was fiction that had nothing to do with losing my last parent, and I’ve learned enough as a writer to go with whatever the gut feeling is. So I found the song on Youtube, listened to it several times, read the lyrics, and sat down and began pounding out a story. Before you know it the words were coming again, and faster than my poor typing skills could get them out of my head and onto the page. In a short session I managed to get over 1100 words onto that page, and I’ve added to it since. Once those floodgates opened again, I was able to go back to the pirate novel and put over 1300 on that one the next day. I’ve added a little to that book since too, although it’s been harder with that one because as historical fiction it requires intense research to get the facts as correct as I can make them. But I have worked on that twice since getting back into writing, in between trips to get my mother’s things together for bringing to my house or to donate. So I have hope again that the writing will not stop.

Yes, I am giving myself time to grieve. I am a person who can mourn and still function, I can move on and still mourn, my mind can separate the overwhelming from the mundane and familiar. I’ve lived with my mother longer than I’ve lived with anyone else in my life up until this point, and yet we never quite got along very well. That doesn’t mean I don’t miss her. She meant a lot to my family too, she was the only babysitter my boys ever had, she was a simple person with a feisty, can-do attitude who made the best she could out of a life that was often filled with hardships and disappointments. The feeling of loss is still very raw for me, and the tears come easily and over the simplest things some times. That’s to be expected. But time is a good teacher and I know that while I am dealing with these deep and disturbing feelings, I have to go on living, for the family and for myself. Writing is a very large and important part of my life now, and to not be able to write is going to send me into a downward spiral into frustration and maybe even depression. I don’t want that happening!

So my advice is, whatever makes you smile, whatever gets you up in the morning to face the new day, just do it. Never mind what you could be doing or should be feeling; this is your life to live, so live it to the fullest. That’s what my mother did, every day until the end. She wasn’t always sunny or pleasant, she cried and got upset, and sometimes stomped off spitting mad or stood her ground and gave someone a verbal upbraiding. But she went on living, and so she made it to 85 in spite of being a mere 4’9” tall and somewhat frail, and all those years of having very little in the way of education, being unable to drive or handle finances, because she had no income or job prospects after losing my father—who was her only love and half her life. She became a widow at the young age of 49 and wound up living with that child she never quite felt comfortable with. Yet somewhere inside my mother realized she had to find a way to make it work for all of us, and so she did. She was passionate about being with family, of taking care of our home, our pets, and her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She rocked babies, planted flowers, raked the yard and fed the birds, hung and brought in laundry to be folded and put away. She fed the chickens, took out the garbage, the recycling, and compost; she vacuumed and washed dishes—just pitching in wherever she was needed. To me that shows me that if I wallow in my grief and stop writing, I’ll be less a person than she was, even though I have a better education and more prospects. So I will write damn it, because I still can, and I should. You do whatever makes you happy to be alive too, you hear me?

~NANCY