Elaine Williams © 2008
According to the U.S Census Bureau, there are approximately 700,000 new widows every year. To me, this is staggering, and I never thought I’d be a statistic.
I've been asked many times if I wrote A Journey Well Taken: Life After Loss while my husband was ill. As a caretaker, and even though I have been a writer for as long as I can recall, writing was the last thing on my mind while he was sick. It wasn't until two and a half years after his death that I decided to put my thoughts down in concrete form, since during this time I was having a hard time emotionally. Loneliness seemed to have engulfed me and was kicking me in the butt. Many days I had a difficult time getting past the grief that enveloped me.
My original intent was to record my fears, face them, and allow them the room they needed to dissipate. To achieve this, I felt I needed to confront what haunted me and deal with the anger and feelings of abandonment that had surfaced, unbeknownst to me. I had to do something to release myself from the pit into which I had fallen. In short, I viewed this writing as a catharsis or healing for myself.
In the beginning, I wrote 20 or 30 pages chronicling my husband's illness and subsequent death. Many times, I would cry as I re-read what I had written. I re-lived the pain in our lives and the affect it had on all of us, especially my boys, who at the time ranged in age from 11 to 19.
After writing the initial 30 or so pages, I thought I had satisfied whatever was driving me to dredge up the memories of those 11 months. I wanted to let it go and be done with it. Surely now, I thought, I could move on with my life. However, it was not that easy. Little by little, I added to the pages I had written. I felt driven to go to the depths and pull out all the gut wrenching emotion, exposing in naked detail the last several years of my life. Before I realized it, I had about 200 pages.
When I finished the story’s rough draft, I knew I had written everything I needed to say. However, I began to get a strong feeling that other women should read it. Considering how personal this "journal" was, after all, I had freely expressed my rawest emotions, I initially resisted this idea.
My original title was Searching for Self, and that was how I viewed my life, that I was “in search of me”. The idea persisted that it needed to be shared because it was not only my story, but the experience of many women. I decided to throw my experiences out there and deal with whatever might come in the process.
There’s a sense of "knowing" in me that A Journey Well Taken: Life After Loss will stand on its own truth and end up where it needs to go.
http://www.ajourneywelltaken.com
