PROLOGUE

In March 2010 when I was nearing the end of my rope,  I began to write an essay entirely for myself, trying to understand what I felt in my heart, if not in the rational part of my brain, that there was something “out there”, something that had tried to communicate with me. The writing became an obsession. Every morning I could hardly wait to get to the computer and even occasionally would delay making breakfast, much to my husband’s annoyance. Even though I had other writing assignments with deadlines, I would go to the essay first and have to tear myself away from it to do that other work. I had no thought of reading it to others, but one night after many months working on it and needing something to read to my writers’ group, I tried it out on them. I told my kids what I was writing and they asked to read it and as I read it to my writer friends, I realized I would have to revise it to make it intelligible to others. I would have to regularize the tenses because I had started writing it when my husband was alive and kept at it after he died. I would have to explain things that I myself obviously didn’t need to have explained. Would my experiences have any value for others, or were they entirely personal, happening to me alone, and might even be false or falsely remembered? I do know that at the lowest point in my life, I was compelled to write this essay, that wrestling with it sustained me. I will revise it, continue to read it to my friends or give it to those who ask for it, and let it make its own way in the world.