I say this to my students all the time and God knows how many times I’ve said it on this blog: take notes. Especially going through hard times. You don’t have to make sense of what’s going on, you don’t have to write well, or write about your emotions, just get the details down.  They might seem obvious or unimportant at the time and maybe they are, or they may turn into gold for future writing. In any event, writing will keep you sane.

What I’m always telling my students and you really hit home in the past few weeks. (See “Before and After” below.)   I’ve been writing in my journal daily and when I didn’t have my journal with me I’d write notes on little scraps of paper.  This is what’s happening, what people say, what we eat, how things look, taste, smell, sound.  Nothing remotely eloquent – just factual details. Stuff I’d forget if I didn’t write it all down. 

I’ve come up with a number of ideas for essays about recent events: becoming a caregiver to someone who is fiercely independent, the difficulty in finding something healthy to eat in a hospital cafeteria that prides itself on its bacon cheeseburgers, how someone can suddenly discover he has near fatal heart blockage even when being disciplined about diet, exercise and doctor visits, and the weird slant of black humor that can pop up in the midst of the horrific (i.e. the covered corpse parked briefly outside my husband’s ICU room.).  Whether this can all turn into a book I have no idea, but if it does, I’ll have the details down.