Yesterday I wrote about my dad-in-law on what would’ve been his 100th birthday. I mentioned his fight with Alzheimer’s, and the brutal way it steals memories. I’m hyper-focused on the subject. It’s the theme of The Making of Saying Goodbye, the series I wrote long before I knew it would affect someone I love.
As a writer, it’s easy to write characters who accomplish important things. My characters handed out Jotters; they made picture book Memory Joggers; they started a foundation matching teen girls who’d lost mothers with mentors who’d lost mothers (Memory Mentors); they funded Alzheimer’s research; and they made documentaries of people who should never be forgotten. Fiction.
In reality, I’m a middle-aged woman who earns an unimpressive income working at a nonprofit university—definitely less unlimited than the characters I create, so I’ve been trying to make a difference on smaller scales. I hand out jotters when I can. I reach out to other women who’ve lost their moms when I can, and I wrote down a year’s worth of memories and turned them into a book so they won’t be forgotten. It’s a small start, but it’s a start. Now, the task is to get those memory prompts off the page and into your heads!
After tossing around ideas of how best to accomplish this, I decided the easiest is to email them. Just click the link below to sign up for my newsletter. You’ll get all of January’s now, and just before the new month begins, you’ll get the next month’s memory prompts! Every month this year! If you’re actually in possession of the book, you still may want to download the prompts to use as a writing guide!
It may seem counterintuitive to send you a major element of my book for free, but this project doesn’t have anything to do with selling books. It has EVERYTHING to do with preserving memories.
I wish I could interview each of you! But, I CAN send you emails to spark memories and encourage you to write them down! If you’ve ever witnessed a loved one whose memories are fading away, you know you’d do whatever you could to safeguard them. And this, my friends, is a small and realistic start.
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