About a month after Bill’s death, I found myself becoming very anxious.
Anxious that I would gradually forget details about:
- those incredible sixteen days between his diagnosis and his death from pancreatic cancer,
- conversations that he and I had about our life together, our travels, our friends, our families, our faith,
- poignant visits of friends and family as they came to say their goodbyes to him,
- the wonderful assistance of the palliative care doctors, nurses, and homemakers who came to our home daily,
- his last moments of life.
If I were to forget those details, it felt to me like I would be losing him all over again.
I wanted to keep and treasure those memories, something like a precious photo album in words.
So I started to write. My heart broke open and the story came cascading out.
As I wrote, I was constantly reminded of experiences that we had had together over our thirty-three years as a gay couple. Quite spontaneously, I began integrating vignettes of our long life together into the chronology of those sixteen days.
I wrote almost non-stop for about six weeks.
August Farewell was the result.