Our Last Acts

Eleven years ago, I started what would become the Bloodlines series. Most people don't get the underlying emotions that I poured into the books. Some do.

Babies and death are prominent in those books because I almost died on the operating table giving birth to Genius Kid. Zombie Love started as my way of dealing with the myriad of emotions of that experience. The stories grew and expanded as other gains and losses happened in my life.

And the emotions overwhelm me again whenever we deal some aspect of DH's cancer. He wanted me to come with him to the local cancer walk on Saturday. We met another couple, Dan and Nida, just a few years older than us. Like DH, Dan started with colon cancer, but he's in Stage Four with experimental treatments the only thing keeping on this side of the gate. He's a marathon runner who's had to change his life radically to deal with the disease.

One of my great-grandfathers said the only constant in life was change. And that's what both birth and death are. A change between one state of being and another.

Ironically, I'm reminded of his words and my own beginnings and endings today as I clean up the seminal scene of Zombie Goddess. It's the beginning of the end of the Sam both I and the readers know and love. Then Neil Gaiman wrote a very personal post about a friend who is dying even as Neil and his wife re expecting their first baby.

Neil put it far more eloquently than I could. He called it existing in the pause.

That's what I feel like right now. That moment between breaths. Between heartbeats. Between reading/writing the first page and the last. Between life and death.

It's all the same pause. And after it's done, thing will never be the same.