Genre: Memoir
Title: No working title
I started writing a journal the night my mom decided to stop cancer treatment and go on hospice care. I wrote daily entries at first, tapered off briefly, and resumed again until a few days after she passed. My last entry was on July 31, about a month after I started.
When I reread the journal a few months later, I was pleasantly surprised with what I'd written. There was nothing book-like about the journal, I suppose, but I thought there was a possibility that I could riff on the entries someday and add some new insights about illness, loss, or hospice.
Reading a number of Maggie Nelson's books in the months afterward opened my thinking further. I considered ways to reprint my entries and add new comments to each. Another possibility was to separate my entries with short essay chapters unrestricted by the forward-moving flow of a journal.
This went from being 'an idea in my head' to 'an idea I'm officially not working on' when I started hospice volunteering. Each shift added nuance to my understanding of the philosophy and my service over the past two years has led to more thoughtful reflections on the experiences I wrote about in the journal.
Starting this blog was another big step forward. I admit, a number of my posts so far are rough drafts of chapters to one day include in the book. Still others imitate the style of writing I would include in the book. And every post, whether it relates to hospice or not, enhances my writing skills.
One consideration for this idea is competition. There is a lot out of great writing already out there about illness and loss. However, I've noticed most of the published work in this area comes directly from the sick. I also commonly come across accounts from close family and friends serving as primary caregivers or medical proxies. In contrast, books about hospice volunteering are relatively rare. If this is going to work for me, I need to consider ways to adjust the angle of my approach and stand out by being noticeably different from (instead of relatively better than) my competitors.
