In The Beginning…

This blog has existed in my imagination for a few months now. I’ve been a writer for most of my life, but have never taken on a project quite like this one. In high school I always got A’s on the papers I wrote (well, I like to think that I did…). In college I loved taking classes that required long papers and lots of research. I enjoyed gathering information, thinking through complex topics and concepts, and organizing those thoughts into a cohesive paper. In law school I learned a more analytical form of writing that became a means to an end. As a lawyer, arguing a case in a legal brief and learning to be persuasive on paper was just as important (if not more so) as being able to argue a case before a jury or judge. These writing skills served me well throughout my career, which migrated from lawyer to mediator to community social worker to university professor.

Writing has been a prevalent part of my personal life as well. When my husband Jay and I moved to Germany after graduate school back in the 1980’s, I wrote long, detailed letters to family. The letters included stories about our daily adventures as well as my first legal cases as a brand new lawyer. The soldiers I represented, whose outlandish behaviors got them into trouble, often made for humorous story-telling fodder.

Many years later I took all of those letters that had been carefully saved and returned to me and stacked them up chronologically. I was stunned to discover that the entire compilation was a running commentary on the daily experience of an American couple living in Europe in the 1980s. The audience was limited, targeted to the family members who were most likely to be interested enough to read each letter all the way through (i.e. my parents and inlaws).

After returning to the states, there were other, periodic, forays into writing about personal and family events. In the 1990s I created a family newsletter called Family Notes, intended to foster connections between dispersed family members on my paternal side. While I actively encouraged others to contribute to the newsletter, most of the content was written and edited by me. It was short-lived, only lasting a few months, but did serve the purpose of leading to a family reunion fairly well attended in the summer of 1994. My son Conrad’s arrival in 1995 signaled the end of pleasure writing for several years, although I did find time to fully document the experience of being pregnant in my group emails to parents, siblings, cousins and aunts and uncles. Don’t ask me why…

*You can peruse the old issues of my family newsletter in the Older Stuff section of this website.*
In 2011 I tried again to start a family newsletter, this time with more success. Word processing and document production technology was more developed, and email had supplanted snail mail as the preferred method of sending documents. *Family Matters* had a wider audience but still targeted primarily the paternal relatives descended from my German immigrant ancestors. The newsletter list grew to include a number of far-flung distant relatives throughout the United States and beyond. While I still did all of the editing and most of the writing, others contributed as well, which kept it alive and interesting for several years.

While somewhat popular, Family Matters nevertheless died a slow death over its three year life, becoming less and less frequent. It stopped altogether when my father’s congestive heart failure and his accelerating decline became my overriding priority. When the biggest supporter of my efforts to connect with family died in 2015, I just couldn’t get excited about keeping up the newsletter anymore.

Work continued. Over a thirty year period I had moved from Ohio to Germany to North Carolina to Pennsylvania to Massachusetts and finally to Michigan. Jobs and career focus shifted and changed, but always included writing, whether for a legal brief, a grant proposal, a project report, an article, or any number of other documents. I threw myself into my teaching and administrative responsibilities at the university and focused my personal life on enjoying good times with family and friends.

*Jay and me in Rome in the 1980s*

My relatively contented and happy life came to a crashing halt in 2017, when my husband of 37 years was diagnosed with an astrocytoma. The doctors didn’t mince words, and informed us that this was a death sentence, as there was and still is no cure for this type of brain cancer. As family and friends circled the wagons of support around us during that horrific time, writing became my emotional outlet.

I opened a page on CaringBridge.com, a communication and journaling website specifically set up for families who are navigating serious health situations. This journal became my lifeline to the outside world during a time when we felt completely isolated and alone. By the time Jay died eight months later there were over 200 people following the site and over 6,000 views of my posts. Many of the people who subscribed to receive my updates were people who had never met Jay or me. They knew someone else connected to the family and got interested in what was happening. I was overwhelmed by the heart-felt support from those who travelled the emotional journey with us as the runaway cancer train sped toward its inevitable end in February of 2018.

After losing Jay I needed a writing outlet for my grief, although I didn’t realize that’s what I was doing at the time. I created a blog called The Kindness Continuum. This blog was outwardly billed as being about kindness in the world, a theme that resonated strongly with me after the outpouring of support I had received during Jay’s illness. The theme of kindness, however, was actually a transparent veil for the underlying theme of processing my grief. Looking back at what I wrote in those months immediately after Jay died, I was publicly grieving in almost every post even while I thought I was focusing on other topics, such as my travels to Africa and Europe. The blog posts began to wind down as 2018 came to a close, and my last post was January 2019. At that point I guess I was done focusing on my loss and finally ready to spend my time figuring out what my life was going to become. I did not feel a compulsion to write or journal about that next phase of my life journey, at least not at that point and not publicly. The Kindness Continuum blog had served its purpose and it was time to move on.

The 1938 Project