I Don't Know How To Tell This Story...Yet.

I don’t know how to tell this story.

This story.

My story.

When I sat down and dedicated one month to writing a memoir, I didn’t know over 80,000 words were going to come out. Letters spilled onto the page, sentence after sentence, and for the first time it felt intentional. Not like the folders upon folders of writing I already had on my computer. Not like the poems, fragments, journal entries, and things I wrote only when I felt inspired or desperate or cracked open enough to get something down.

This was different.

I sat down on purpose, and more than 80,000 words came out of my mouth.

It is a really weird thing to see your whole life on paper.

I did that in one month.

It was November, which was probably a dumb idea. November is the worst month of my life. It comes right on the heels of my wedding anniversary on Halloween. Then my husband’s birthday. Then his death anniversary a few weeks later.

Why I chose November, I’ll never know. But let me just tell you, there was no dry December in my house after I saw all those words in front of me.

I think I kind of just short-circuited.

Then I thought, I can never publish this. So I sat on it. And then I kept writing anyway. Because I still don’t know how to tell this story. And that is what I am supposed to be good at.

Story.

But this one covers marriage and travel and art and illness and death and grief and survival and becoming and lions and tigers and bears, oh my.

Okay, maybe not tigers and bears.

But definitely lions.

I had a lion when I was a child. Well, it wasn’t really mine. It was my dad’s. But it definitely belongs in the memoir.

Anyway. Getting back to what I was saying.

The real story, for me, starts when I met my late husband. And that story still feels way too alive to hold in a straight line.

It has been really hard to structure this memoir. And structure is definitely something that challenges me. I have to trick myself into thinking structure is a path to freedom, because if I don’t use the word freedom somewhere near the word structure, I will automatically not sit down and do any of it.

A friend once told me my life was a journey that should only be taken on paper.

She wasn’t wrong.

The question is: how many papers?

I told another friend recently that my life has been heavy-fated. And I mean, come on. In the past nine months alone, my father was killed head-on in a car crash and my mother just got out of brain surgery.

That is only nine months. I have been alive for a long time. Heavy. Fate.

Someone asked me the other day how I got so talented, and I’ll be honest, the answer is pain.

I have been through a lot of pain. I have been through a lot of loss. I have also been through a lot of adventures. And I am resilient AF. The pain forced me to create. I was like a Jedi using the force.

And I still am.

At some point, I realized I had been documenting my whole life with art.

Everything I have ever created is a visual document of what I have endured. I have documented my life through photography, everywhere I have ever been. I have documented it through writing, too. In the beginning, most of it was poems.

I wrote a lot of poetry.

A lot.

I have a stack of printed poetry in my house that sits almost three feet tall. I am not lying, folks.

I am not saying it is all good. Some of it probably reads more like a journal. But it was all those letters, all that pain, all that trying to make something out of what I could not understand, that helped me foster creativity, art, and writing.

My house used to feel alive when Patrick was here. And part of it died along with him. I had to resuscitate something from within myself to become the woman I am now. That does not mean the reminders are gone. They live in every corner of every room I walk through.

I keep thinking the memoir should begin neatly. Like I should be able to take my own life and make it into chapters and arcs and outlines and something people not only chew on, but something they don’t want to stop eating.

That is a lot of pressure. And I try not to think about it too much, because if I think about it too much, I won’t do it.

But what am I supposed to say?

Here is where I was born. Here is what happened. Here is who I loved. Here is how I became this version of myself. P.S. Insert dying husband here.

That is not how memory works.

Memory doesn’t arrive in chapters. At least not for me. It arrives in flashes.

A room. A song. A smell. A place. An old video. A photograph I can barely look at. A voice I still expect to hear. The feeling of coming home to someone who made the world make sense.

This house used to pulse with creativity.

Private Friday night dance parties. Music downstairs. LED lights flashing disco from the front window when I pulled up to the house. A bottle of Jameson on the counter with a shot glass next to it.

I could hear the music from the garage before I even got inside. I knew he was down there working on something he thought was a fantastic painting. I knew there would be some ridiculous energy already waiting for me, maybe in the form of a canvas, maybe in the form of dinner on the grill gone wrong.

I knew before I even opened the door.

Man, we had fun.

Two kids running around the world together. Making movies. Traveling to faraway places. Emptying our bags into the trash just so we could fill them with artifacts we found on the Thames River in England. I swore TSA was never going to let us through.

But they did.

It is strange how cancer can erase some things in your mind. Sometimes it is hard for me to remember him before the grief, before the hospital rooms, before the panic, before the quiet that came after, when there was so much life here.

The walls went silent.

The cancer did not just consume him.

It consumed us.

It consumed what we were.

Sometimes I go through his old journals and things he left behind, and I laugh because I remember how much fun we had. And when I read the pages I have written about our life together, I am sadly and happily reminded of how good it was.

Cancer made me forget that for a while because it was so fucking hard.

I don’t walk through my house the same way anymore.

But I can still hear some things in my mind.

Patrick just had a way about him. Everyone said he was big. Big presence. Big laugh. Big energy. Big love. And a big smile.

He was the kind of person who changed the temperature of a room just by entering it. The kind of person people still talk about because of all his antics and way of being.

He has become a reference point here. On jobs. In rooms. In stories. In the way people still say his name.

I found a Post-it note the other day from when we first met. He said: I feel alive with you, Jols.

So I guess we did that for each other.

We lived on a little dead-end street in a tiny house we called Casa Petita. A tiny house with a big life inside of it. I don’t know how this house didn’t burst from all the music and plans and paint clothes and stories and laughter,

And Ideas. So many ideas. Whether it was a new painting, movie script or the next wild road trip.

That is where part of this memoir lives.

Not just in what happened at the end.

In what existed before the ending.

I think that is why it has taken me so long to know how to tell it. Because people understand tragedy quickly. They understand the sentence: my husband died. They understand cancer. They understand loss, at least from the outside.

But how do you explain the size of the love before the loss?