Wednesday, April 30, 2008

The Sad End


While you’re reading this blog, I am standing under an umbrella, watching the somber procession of fire trucks down Main Street, and hoping that the two wives who lost their husbands last week are somehow holding up.

This wasn’t the blog I’d intended to write. In fact, I had the other one all ready to go. But in light of our community’s recent tragedy, it just didn’t fit. As I was finishing my YA novel on Thursday, my husband returned from a search and rescue mission with heartbreaking news: two of his firefighting brothers died in an ATV accident.

Previously uncertain how to end the book, I scribbled the last page and a half that night, not with giddy redemption or sticky optimism, but with self-realization, and a hint of hope.

Life goes on while we write. It doesn’t stop – not even for conclusions. It influences plot, characters, even blogs.

If I have to, on a better day, I’ll rewrite the end of the book, redeeming my troubled boy.

But for now, I’ll keep it as it is – preserving the spirit of the moment: the loss of two beloved men, and the families and brotherhood of firefighters they left behind – raw and imperfect, but true.

John and Gale, rest well…

1 comment:

Kelly Hudgins said...

I don't know you yet, Jennie, but you and your friends are in my thoughts. So much tragedy and violent death around us these days, it seems. I thought it was just me.