In September 2010, I began to write a story that documented the journey I started after losing my husband to suicide on December 14, 2008. I believe the idea came to me after I wrote a “Mission Moment” for the South Shore YMCA here in Milwaukee, WI and seeing the effects it had on people. I had also seen an article in Self magazine that shared the editors story. It didn’t take long for me to stop writing the story. May it was writers block or a fear to write it, but I couldn’t tell it.

Late November rolled around and I started in the Higher Brain Living program. As I moved forward, the story lingered in my brain, pretty much like grief symptoms that over stayed. In March 2011 and attending my first Authentic Self~Kosmic Consciousness retreat and I discovered my passion for writing. I tremendously progressed in my grieving while on retreat and my brain informed me that I had to finish the story. Finished it I did, but couldn’t get in published in a few magazines or so I thought. My second cousins wife, an author, edited the story and highly suggested I sign up for a certain creative writing class. I did. On the night of the first class, I shared the story I wrote. My instructor told me that it’s a book in two pages with each paragraph a new chapter. Speechlessness consumed me as well as dumbfounded. A book? Yeah, right.

Spring 2012 had me at the annual Dare to Be Aware Fair and people I know from Higher Brain Living directed me to the Henschel Haus Publishing table to talk to Kira Henschel, the CEO of the company. I walked over and introduced myself and then she knew about the book possibility and asked me about its progress every time we ran into each other at events. It took me until May 2012 to finally sit down for three hours to develop the book outline. Not only did I have a book coach, but now I had a publisher. This began another section of my journey I never knew existed.

I may have had a plan, but it would take until the winter of 2012 to really start writing it. It took until October of 2013 to complete the manuscript. Since then it’s been a busy time seeing the manuscript start becoming a book. A book that’s going to help others who have worked through a suicide or any tragedy. 2014 brings great things.