Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” – Plato
Dancing Alone: Learning to Live Again tells my story of grieving the loss of my best friend and wife; and, my efforts to learn to live again. My wife, Babe, was as healthy as any human being can get. She was a vegetarian, exercised regularly, and never felt sick, until … She was diagnosed with stage IV glioblastoma. Ten weeks after her diagnosis, I said goodbye. My grieving began. That was nearly three years ago. I began writing as soon as the last guest left because I wanted to document what I experienced and see if I could find a way through my living hell. It wasn’t easy. The low points always seemed to have an upper hand. There were times when I thought I’d never be happy. I found my way through. I’m now happy. I don’t have what I once had, but I’m grateful I had it.
Over the next few weeks I will share excerpts from Dancing Alone: Learning to Live Again with you. If you are grieving, or have deeply grieved a loss, you’ll relate. If you’ve not experienced a deep loss, the book will help to understand the grieving experience of those you know and love .
Ordering information for the paperback or ebook version of Dancing Alone: Learning to Live Again may be found here.
.
An insightful, experienced oncologist told me that cancer need not be a person’s whole book, only a chapter. Still, novelists know that some chapters inform all others. These are the chapters of your life that wallop you and teach you and bring you to tears, that invite you to step to the other side of the curtain, the one that divides those of us who must face our destiny sooner rather than later. ~ Alice Hoffman
Source: NY Times
In an envelope marked:
Personal
God addressed me a letter.
In an envelope marked:
Personal
I have given my answer.
Langston Hughes
“Love is a symbol of eternity. It wipes out all sense of time, destroying all memory of a beginning and all fear of an end.” – Author Unknown
Every writer scrounges for inspiration in different places, and there’s no shame in raiding the headlines. It’s necessary, in fact, when attempting contemporary satire. Sharp-edged humor relies on topical reference points. ~ Carl Hiaasen
Source: NY Times
Don’t worry if your job is small,
And your reward are few.
Remember that the mighty oak,
Was once a nut like you.
~ Anonymous
Never go gloomy, man with a mind,
Hope is a better companion than fear;
Providence, ever benignant and kind,
Gives with a smile what you take with a tear;
All will be right,
Look to the light.
Morning was ever the daughter of night;
All that was black will be all that is bright,
Cheerily, cheerily, then cheer up.
Many a foe is a friend in disguise,
Many a trouble a blessing most true,
Helping the heart to be happy and wise,
With love ever precious and joys ever new.
Stand in the van,
Strike like a man!
This is the bravest and cleverest plan;
Trusting in God while you do what you can.
Cheerily, cheerily, then cheer up.
Anonymous
“Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.” ~ Dr. Albert Szent-Gyorgyi
Surely the writer’s job is to make relevant the world she wishes to write about. How? By writing well and carefully and powerfully. By using humor, as Cheever did; or violence, as O’Connor did; or rue, as Chekhov did, to make the territory of her imagination compelling and somehow universal. And that holds true whether the territory of the imagination is close to the literal truth of her life or far from it. ~ Sue Miller
Source: NY Times
