In 2016, I’ll be working on a new project, called Partly In Heaven.  It’s a nonfiction inspirational story of how one family dealt with a grave illness and how they sustained their faith and hope for two decades against overwhelming odds.

I have known my good friend and co-worker Jeff for nearly twenty- five years.  In 1996, Jeff’s wife Pam was diagnosed with a cancerous tumor in her brain.  Although the doctors were able to remove 95% of the tumor mass and determined that it was a slow-growing tumor, Pam would undergo numerous operations and treatments over the next 17 years.  In February 2013, she died from this cancer and her long struggle was finally over.

But that’s only part of the story.

Her daughter Melissa started a blog on Caring Bridge in early 2013 and over the next several months, posted daily updates to this blog.  It makes for some of the most heart-wrenching reading I’ve ever encountered.  A year later, Jeff came to me (we worked at the same employer for almost twenty five years; Jeff is now retired and mine is on the horizon), and asked me to read these blog posts and see if something couldn’t be done with them, as a sort of memorial to his wife.  I read them all and was in tears by the time I finished.  That’s how the idea of Partly in Heaven came into being.

 The title comes from something Melissa said in one of her posts, about her mom Pam already being “partially in heaven”, referring to herself as a plural “us.”  Melissa believed she was already talking with deceased loved ones and perhaps others as well.  She had one foot in the door of heaven already.

I have never done a book like this one before.  I worked up an outline to start the story with the day Pam actually died and then go back to when she and Jeff first met, how they got together, how they lived their early married life and when the kids came.  Details and anecdotes about this will have to come from Jeff and his family.  I plan to bring the story along chronologically from that point, concentrating on the period from her first diagnosis up until the end.  I will intersperse these biographical details with current theories on what happens to us as we go through the dying process, the Christian view of death and what happens to our souls when we die, medical details on Pam’s tumor and the treatments she went through, what happened and what didn’t happen, a little bit of Church doctrine from Jeff’s family church about what Heaven is like and what they anticipate when they arrive there, and some details about hospice and what Pam’s (and our) end days are like.

But the centerpiece of this book has to be Melissa’s blog posts.  In between the biographical details and the medical and theological details, I will put in (probably in chronological order), each and every post Melissa made to Caring Bridge up to and including the most recent posts.  That’s the glue that will hold this story together.

There’s a real inspiring tale here and I glimpsed some of it reading Melissa’s blog posts.  I only hope I can do justice to what the family went through in my work on the rest of the book.

The outline is in place and now all Jeff, Melissa and I have to do is fill in the details with facts and figures, memories and anecdotes.  I don’t know how all this will turn out but it’s a project that I feel compelled to do, and not just because Jeff and I have been friends and co-workers for so many years.  This ordeal is one that many people face and one of the most difficult aspects in getting through it is feeling that nobody out there really knows (or cares) what you’re dealing with.  That’s why Caring Bridge has been so successful and why the platform they offer and maintain is so vital to helping all of us share the burden and know that, even in our darkest hours, God has a plan for us. 

My next post will be provide some details on why I’m a better novelist than short story writer.  Writing short stories is hard and my hat’s off to those who can do it successfully.  I’ve tried my hand at it and though I think some of the stories are pretty good, I can’t convince anyone else of that.  Maybe you’ve had the same problem.  In the next post, we can share beers and cry over our problems together.

See you on January 11. 

Phil B.