My Gutsy Story Anthology

I’ve been so proud to be a part of the group of sixty-four writers who participated in the 2013 edition of  the My Gutsy Story Anthology: True Stories of Love, Courage and Adventure from Around the World, conceived and edited by Sonia Marsh. The anthology has won three awards so far:

• 2014 ELIT Gold Award for Anthologies
• 2014 International Book Awards Finalist
• 2013 Benjamin Franklin Award Silver Honoree Winner at the Paris Book Festival

Sonia is now taking submissions for the all-new 2015 anthology. I encourage you to submit your story now. Click here to find out how.

Here’s the piece I wrote for the 2013 edition. And if you like my piece, I promise you, you won’t be disappointed in the sixty-three other stories in this wonderfully inspiring book. You can buy it here.

My Gutsy Story

When my older son Paul died by suicide in 1999 after a seven-year battle with bipolar disorder, I knew I had to find ways to keep myself busy and productive or else I would wallow away in my grief. At the time of his death I was writing grant proposals for a homeless shelter, but I found too many reminders working from my home office. The solution, I thought, was to work outside my home.

After two false starts at part-time jobs outside writing grant proposals for our local free clinic and managing capital campaigns as a fundraising consultant I decided the way for me to live with the death of my older son was to get rehired by the aerospace company I retired from in the mid-1990s where I had worked off and on since the mid 1960s. When a job opening came up in January 2003, I jumped at it and was hired.

My job was to help my company produce proposals, a huge document or set of documents, meant to persuade the government to hire us to do their needed work. The job was challenging, meaningful, and very stressful all necessary to keeping my mind so occupied with other things I would have no time to grieve. Each proposal project had a defined beginning, middle, and end so it gave me the opportunity to work with ever-changing proposal teams. I thrived on that socialization, the respect others had for my work, and the challenges of training engineers how to write in English.

Meeting stringent deadlines made me stronger, and keeping my mind on the job stopped me from dwelling on my loss. Plus, I gained skills in setting goals, organizing work and the people I worked with, and managing to a deadline all skills necessary to my writing career now.

But I kept feeling the draw of creative writing. I had studied journalism in high school and college, I had taken many writing classes and workshops, and by 2009, I was already shopping a memoir I had written (in my spare time) about the death of our son and how our family survived. So I started to think about retiring from my day job again. Except I kept hesitating. I was afraid to take that step. I was afraid I would fall apart without by full-time job crutch.

Even though I asked myself: why was I doing my company’s work of taking men and women back to the moon? Why should I do this work instead of working on my own writing projects? Why was I sabotaging my creativity and healing? I rationalized that I needed the structure, the socialization, and the money. I rationalized that I wouldn’t do well working from home again alone. But it was none of those. I just plain refused to find out if I could live and survive on my own and as the full-time writer I so longed to be. 

Well, I finally did retire, but it took me until April 2010, to do it. When I look back at all those years of indecision, I realize I just couldn’t make the final decision until I was good and ready. Until I felt comfortable enough with myself. Until I stopped carrying around the grief and sorrow. 

And the timing was perfect.

Two months after I retired I got a publishing contract for my memoir Leaving the Hall Light On: A Mother’s Memoir of Living with Her Son’s Bipolar Disorder and Surviving His Suicide that I had been pitching for over two years. Almost immediately I was knee-deep in revising my book and getting it ready for publication and getting more and more involved with the social networking necessary to publicize my book. Best of all, after my book was published, I was able to move on to the career I’ve wanted to have since I was a teenager: as a journalist and creative writer.

I like to think that Paul’s death gave me the gift of this new career and a new mission in life. I created a book with the goal of helping others who have experienced a loss like mine; I am working as a web journalist for several online sites that deal with survival, healthy living, and being a vibrant over 60-year old; I’m busy writing a novel, and I discovered my most important work of all: helping to erase the stigma of mental illness and prevent suicide with the hope of saving lives. If my writing helps attain that mission, it will all be worth it.