Reliving

 I have shared before that I have felt called to write a book about the journey with Jessica's illness and our spiritual valleys that accompany that path. Jessica often said that she should "write a book" about her experiences, and I told her that I could be her "ghostwriter." 

While I can't really ghostwrite in the usual sense of her telling me her feelings and experiences, I felt that I could write it from my perspective and try to convey much of, at least, what she shared with me. During the time of her illness, she and I became closer than we had been in many years. We had the time to talk and work out some of the difficulties we experienced in our relationship, primarily brought about by her biological father. He relinquished his relationship with her several years ago, and while Jessica reached out to him by phone more than once to try to build a bridge, he responded by hanging up on her. The repeated emotional pain he inflicted on her during her lifetime was too much to bear any further. 

So, back to the book. I had been doing well writing this book and working through not only Jessica's early years, but also the recent past of building a family and discovering the diagnosis of cancer. When the part of writing the book arrived that covered her hospitalizations in London and Toronto, it became more of a challenge. Reliving those days when I held hope and grief in the same hand brought back so much anguish that these chapters were extremely painful to write. 

It had actually been a few weeks since I had really completed any writing other than a blog post a couple of weeks ago. Yesterday, I didn't plan to work on the book, but for some reason I opened up my Scrivener program. I started to write about Jessica's stay on the palliative ward in the hospital. Since these were her final days, I wanted to get the correct timeline, so I went back through some Facebook posts. This was challenging in and of itself, but the real wave activator came when I went to the Messenger thread between Jessica and me, around the time of her arm injury and diagnosis.  

Reliving those days stirred a range of emotions I hadn't been prepared for. After all, I was only checking dates to have an accurate timeline.