Book Coaching: Its Own Kind of Dance
I’ll return to Part 4 of my series — How an Idea Becomes a Book, Part 4: Who Else Might Care About Your Idea? — next week, but I wanted to share a personal update about my mom. What we’re doing at Author Accelerator is building a community of book coaches and that means sharing the ups and downs of starting and running book coaching businesses, as well as sharing the ups and downs of simply being alive. It’s kind of all the same thing to me.
A lot of you have heard me talk about my mom in recent months during working sessions, mastermind sessions, and in our community groups. I wrote about her cognitive decline in a newsletter post more than a year ago, around the time this picture was taken at the Santa Barbara Botanic Gardens. It’s been downhill for her ever since. She was diagnosed with advanced Alzheimer’s toward the beginning of the pandemic and it’s taken us this whole time to come to a viable solution for her care.
On Wednesday, my sister and I moved my mom into a memory care facility — which, in the time of COVID restrictions, meant dropping her off and walking away without knowing when we might see her again.
It was as horrible as it sounds. We know that she will feel betrayed and angry, confused and alone. But we also know we are doing what is best for her.
Being with my mom in recent months has been a lesson in being present — noticing the color of the sky, the quality of the clouds, the flight of birds — because that’s all she’s able to do. It’s a profound lesson to be sure. And it makes me value memory more than I ever understood before. Without memory, you have no agency and no freedom. You do not have the ability to tell a story. You cannot make meaning out of anything.
Besides whatever is right in front of her, the one other thing my mother still has is song. She busts out Broadway show tunes in response to things she sees and hears. She is partial to songs from Oklahoma and South Pacific, and also a lyric from The Pajama Game that (in her interpretation, anyway) goes: “The pajama game is the game we’re in and we’re in the pajama game.” What remains of an entire life of travel and adventure, raising children, running her own travel agency, and helping in her community, are some circular lyrics and simple show tunes.
I’m sure a neuroscientist or gerontologist has some scientific explanation for this reality, but I am a book coach, and what I chose to make of it is that creativity matters — that writing something (a song for a musical, a poem or an essay, a play or a book) or creating something (a community or a business, a service or a product) for other people to experience and enjoy and remember matters. You never know who it will impact, or when or how, but you hope it will and you believe it might.
The internet recently served me up this clip (how did it know???) that reinforces my belief in a bone-chilling and beautiful way. It’s about a former prima ballerina who has lost her ability to function in the world, but when played the music for “her” song — well: You can see how deeply the music and the movement are embedded in this woman’s bones and her memory. You can see how deeply she lived it. I found it breathtaking. It made me want to keep doing what I am doing — which is its own kind of dance.
It was a sad week for me* and I just wanted to say that I’m glad to be in a community with all of you — making books and businesses, making memories, and making meaning. I love my work, and it makes the sadness a little easier to bear.
*Ironically, this sad week was flooded with fabulous client news, too. One of my clients landed the first agent she pitched for her first novel and got a gushing reception; another client landed a book deal at a Big 5 publisher for her first nonfiction book; and a third client (we all know it was KJ! YAY KJ!) landed on the New York Times bestseller list. Happy and sad, hopeful and hopeless, highs and lows, all jammed into one week. That’s what I mean about business and life being all mixed up together in one powerful swirl.
