Content Warning: Brief mention of cancer
It’s impossible to write an immortal protagonist and not think about mortality.
Your own.
That of the people you love.
It is a uniquely human reflection, knowing what it means to have a limited amount of time, never knowing how much, knowing only that none of it is guaranteed.
Maybe writing is my own desperate grasp at living forever. I think creatives more than most are haunted by a sense of their own mortality. They have an innate need to share a part of themselves with the world, to have a piece of themselves live on long after they are gone, to say, I am here, I was here, I was somebody. Remember me.
“They” tell you to write what you know, that every book holds a piece of an author’s heart, captures that time of their life somewhere deep in its pages. I can see myself in Beatrix, afraid of dying before fully living. I can see myself in Oliver, full of regrets and what-ifs as he marvels at the speed at which life slips through his fingers.
I am the mother of two kids who refuse to stop growing up. I remember watching my oldest sleep in my arms as a baby—crying, worrying my husband—because she wouldn’t stay that little forever. Now, sometimes I feel guilty, because on the hard days I silently wish they were older, bigger, more grownup.
I turned forty last year, but I didn’t mind. I’ll be forty-one soon, and no crisis yet. I still don’t mind, even with the extra gray hairs and the new lines in my face. I joke that it’s better than the alternative.
Our family lost four grandparents in less than 18 months, the last of that generation, gone.
My mother has cancer. I hated typing that, hate seeing those words in black and white. We are lucky, treatment has been working as well as it can. Mostly we don’t talk about it. Some days, it feels like a ticking clock.
So I brainstormed and drafted and edited and I wrote what I knew. I cried at my keyboard.
As I wrote All We Have is Time, I kept coming back to the ideas of time and regret, loss and grief, and how they are all facets of love.
If you had all the time in the world, what would you do?
What if you watched everyone you loved leave before you?
If you knew just how little time you had left in the world, would you do it differently?
If your life was a ticking clock or an unending span, what would really matter?
I hope when people read my book they see themselves in Beatrix and Oliver, too. I hope they ask themselves these same questions. But mostly, I hope they answer them.
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