Some
stories seem to tell themselves. Others take years to complete. MOM’S
LAST MOVE is a memoir that began as scribbles in a journal, scribbles
scrawled in an attempt to make sense of life’s pain and chaos, scribbles
that continued for the eleven years and twenty days between my father’s
death on February 2, 2002 and that of my mother on February 22, 2013.
They
were silent scribbles that simmered and sat in wait for that moment
when I was able to see the story in the scribbles. Looking back, I’m
unsure when the long process of creating memoir from scribbles began.
Then there was more waiting as challenges were overcome, decisions were
made, and publication was put in place. Fourteen years have passed since
I began those first scribbles during the long nights and early mornings
following Dad’s death.
MOM’S
LAST MOVE is a story in three strands, like the three leaves of the
Irish shamrock or the Triple Morrigan: crone-mother-maiden.
Mom
is the focus of the primary strand. After publication of my first
memoir, THE THIRTY-NINTH VICTIM, readers asked about my mother. Those
gentle, concerned questions about a woman who had lost her partner of
fifty-four years while also reliving the horror of her youngest child’s
murder compelled me to share this story of motherhood. My mother was a
woman I neither understood nor admired in the manner she deserved until
she could no longer understand the depth of my love or the regret that
held it.
The
second strand of the story tells of my daughter’s journey through the
tumultuous teens and my struggles to understand normalcy. I was overcome
by unrealistic and unfounded fears for my daughter based on the
unrelated and dissimilar reality of my youngest sister’s murder at
nineteen, a murder solved twenty years later when my daughter was
fourteen.
I
explore my journey as a writer in the third strand. I didn’t begin
writing until age forty-eight in direct response to the Gary Ridgway
arrest and my father’s death two months later. I was a wreck. Writing
was my salvation. THE THIRTY-NINTH VICTIM became my voice, a voice some
in my family were not ready to hear. MOM’S LAST MOVE tells the story of conflict and love, of the strength of sibling bonds to overcome absolute disagreement.
MOM’S LAST MOVE is now available on Amazon. Your interest and readership mean the world. I hope my story resonates
in unexpected ways. I hope you share it with friends and family. And, if
you’re inclined, I hope you’ll consider a short scribble on Amazon to
share your reading experience.
