April 2026
I’m on a bit of a comeback tour—not that I’ve had a tour to come back to, but I have had to come back in many ways over the last ten years.
On April 10, 2016, my husband died in a hotel room north of Austin, Texas. No warning that I could pick up on. I went to the lobby for coffee, came back, and he was gone. Gurgling, head rolled back, unresponsive. Gone.
I yelled at Siri to call 911 while I simultaneously called my daughter to get her brothers and get over to the hotel. Dad was having a heart attack.
We took the four-hour drive from north of Dallas to north of Austin the day before. Grandchildren’s christening. Something we talked our daughter into. Something she reluctantly agreed to.
Mass, baptisms, family dinner. Back to the hotel. Gene was working on a program he named Good Puppy Productions, a design, photography, and graphic arts program, so he could transition out of the corporate job he took when we got married and started having children.
He needed a break. He needed to work in a job where he could use his big brain and big imagination. Banking was not satisfying to his soul. It never was, but it was the means to keep us fed, clothed, and housed for 36 years.
He was working on a fresh start.
He didn’t get that. At least not on this plane of existence.
He did, however, get picked up by the Blessed Mother. I saw that. Yes, I saw that. She picked him up like you would lift a child into her arms. A new Pieta. This time with my husband. They were bathed in a pink/gold aura. Beautiful. She’s healing him, I knew it. It was a moment of joy. Look, the Blessed Mother is healing my husband. There was light emanating from broad wounds in his back as she lifted him, as if he had been pierced with a sword. He was suffused with primrose light.
A sword shall pierce your soul. Joachim to Mary as she presented her baby at the Temple.
Every mother knows that; every wife or husband who has dared to love deeply, completely, profoundly, and eternally, knows that. I know that now. A sword shall pierce your soul. A sword, indeed.
The almost miracle, the one I wanted, didn’t happen. Instead, I heard him speak, as clearly as he spoke to me less than an hour before, I don’t want to hold you back. I yelled back, internally, but still my throat was raw. Hold me back from what!!! I want you!!
The ambulance people banged on the room door. I was ushered out. Our children had arrived. We were sent to an empty room with a police chaplain.
And so began the next phase of my life. Stunned. Shocked. Angry. Bewildered. Unmoored.
What was the point of me now? Our children were grown. It was just the two of us for the first time since we married. We talked of what we, just he and I, were going to do. How we would step forth into the world of the empty nest couple.
We never got that. That last one had only just moved out. One week for just the two of us.
One week.
In the last ten years, we have had two new grandbabies. Some of our children’s marital status has changed. I sold the house where we raised our family and moved back to the East Coast. I have four children in four states, from the East Coast to California.
I live alone now. Decades of a lovely, big, noisy, joyous, messy family. The quiet is sometimes disturbing and often quite lonely.
But I talk to Gene. Every day. Every night. I sing silly songs to him. recall various moments from our long past. 52 years and counting. Yes, I’m still counting. We are not done. We cannot be.
So, what is this new phase? The post ten-year phase? Somehow, in a way mysterious to me, my novel, The Narrow Gate, is being read. I have done nothing to promote it. I had almost forgotten it. I almost took it down from Amazon but never got around to it. It had things I was going to fix and maybe, re-release.
However, the last few months I have been receiving emails telling me that people are reading my book. That they are interested in promoting my book. Where did they even hear of it? Beats me.
I am very naïve, I know—I imagine that AI has something to do with it—AI, the big bad wolf of the literary world. I suppose there must have been a search, a wide net cast, and my novel on betrayal, forgiveness, spirituality and love hit some marks.
I resisted at first, thinking it was all a scam. Some of them probably were. But some were really just a new avenue of advertising, of which I had done very little when the book first came out. And then Gene died. I was in a cocoon for several years, trying to find my identity without my partner, my best friend, my lover: my husband.
So, here we are. I had to resurrect this blog, which Gene set up for me. He was the administrator, and I still don’t know what I’m doing. I will find a smart young person to help me figure out how to post and send, and try to get an audience. But, for now, this is me, stepping back into the world of writing.