In DUETS WITH A DEAD DAUGHTER: A MEMOIR OF HOLDING
LIFE TOGETHER, when I travel alone and terrified to Australia to scatter
my daughter’s ashes, I believe I will return home to begin a new life
without her. But Marika’s fearlessness, her poems and last words,
“Mom, get a life,” are daring me to consider, whose life am I holding
onto?
Two journeys are interwoven in this 200-page / 63,000-word
memoir: the journey through the wilds of cancer holding onto my headstrong
eighteen-year-old daughter Marika who was fighting for personal independence
while fighting for her life, and the trip to Australia after her death,
retracing Marika’s steps taken during a time of remission, from Sydney
to Melbourne to the shipwrecked coasts of the Great Ocean Road. A single
mother with imperfect parenting skills, I was immobilized and unemployed
in the midst of my daughter’s battle with leukemia. I went through
a second coming-of-age when the life I knew was catapulted out the window.
After her death, as I discover in her writings the daughter I didn’t
know in the day-to-day, I begin to grow into my own life. The two journeys
form a kind of duet, enhanced by Marika’s original songs and poems
and my own responses to them. The book also addresses other challenges:
saying goodbye to one who is dying; keeping a deceased loved one in
the present; dealing with an estranged husband and his new wife; inventing
a feed-and-read support group; understanding military family members’
conflicting attitudes on life; and exploring non-religious perspectives
on death.
This story is a wild ride into every mother’s worst
fears. It is a recovery story of how I found ways to honor my daughter,
hold her close, and grow in the pain of her death. It’s about losing
a life and getting a life back.
NOTE: DUETS WITH A DEAD DAUGHTER is still just
a manuscript. In April 2017, I will begin querying for an agent to help
me find a publisher.