Those of you who know me remember my husband of 34 years died 22 months ago. The grief road was a difficult one to travel and, for a long while, writing was my only solace. I couldn’t work on my current novel, so I wrote a grief journal every day for months. I allowed myself to feel whatever I felt and then tried my best to find the words to describe those feelings. Why? Who knows? It is what I do when I’m trying to understand myself and the world around me.
While I’ve come a very long way, and love has found me again, there is still something that happened during that time continuing to haunt me. His first brain bleed left him paralyzed on the left side and pretty helpless. He ran the gamut of emotions from sadness, humiliation, concern for me, self-pity, and ultimately rage. During those terrible days, Covid also raging, Andy asked me frequently to help him die. He pleaded, begged, cried, and ultimately screamed, “Susan, why won’t you help me?”
Almost two years later, I still hear those words—often in my sleep. I wanted to help him. We’d had many theoretical discussions during the years about what we would do if one of us ended up in a situation like Andy did, or developed Alzheimer’s disease and no longer knew ourselves or each other. We agreed that we’d do everything in our power to help the other one die. But when it came right down to it, I couldn’t. This inability to help him has caused me both regret and shame. In some ways, it was fortunate he had the second bleed and all hope of any kind of recovery disappeared. He never regained consciousness, but he got his wish and died five days later.
I suppose it was the haunting, the recurrent nightmare that gave me the idea for the next book in the Radhauser Series. I woke up one morning and thought, “What if I helped him? What if the police arrested me for murder?” Those two questions planted the seeds for another novel. And I knew it was one I had to write. Over the last few weeks, those seeds have taken root and grown to 33,000 words. I will title the next book, River of Mercy. I hope to complete it by next summer. Life and art—sometimes it’s hard to separate them.