When my little sister was preparing for her death, she flew from Vancouver to visit me in Lexington, Kentucky, where I was living at the time, to discuss her final wishes. It was a conversation she very much wanted to have. As gentle and sweet as Maureen was, she could be quite determined when something mattered to her.

We spent hours on my screened-in porch, which looked out over the garden that had nearly overtaken my backyard. It was lush, tangled, and always overgrown—because I’m no gardener and was content to let nature take the lead. To me, it looked like a fairyland, and I was inappropriately proud of it.

We talked about everything on that porch—her life in Vancouver as a newly married woman, her dreams for the life she hoped to have with her husband if only she had more time. She talked about how it felt to be so near to death and what she wanted for her funeral. Our conversations were long, meandering, unflinching, accompanied in the morning by coffee, in the afternoon by iced tea or lemonade, in the evening by a bottle of good red wine.

Maureen’s terminal diagnosis had spurred in her an intense desire to write, and she wrote prolifically and with understandable urgency. She had so much she wanted to say and to share. She was deeply rooted in her faith and longed to bring others closer to God.

Maureen and I shared a compulsion to write and a love of language and books. We both loved the work of Barbara Kingsolver, Anne Lamott, Wendell Berry, and C.S. Lewis. So when Maureen told me she was leaving me all of her writing and hoped that maybe one day I could find a way to publish some of it, I promised her I would.

It took me 18 years to keep that promise with The Storms As They Roll In, released this year on what would have been her 58th birthday. For a long time, the grief was too raw. Eventually, every few years, I would return to the box and the digital files and try to make sense of them, and I'd feel overwhelmed. There were so many files, so many notebooks, so many scraps of paper with the remnants of Maureen's lively, curious mind. I didn’t know how to pull it all together.

I can't say what prompted it, but this past December I had a flash of clarity and dug out the box from the closet shelf where I keep it with my other family treasures. I spent days reading Maureen's work and discovered gems I hadn’t seen before—like the story she told of our road trip to Vancouver when she moved out there to attend Regent College, where she would meet her husband, Steve. It took weeks and weeks to curate a collection of her writing, but eventually I finished the first draft. I sent it off to Steve to ask for his blessing and review, which he gave readily, along with a lovely story of their courtship to include in the book.

The hardest part of curating, editing, and publishing Maureen’s memoir is not being able to tell her that, for two weeks, it was the No. 1 bestseller in her Amazon category (albeit a small one). She would have loved that. 

The best part of those months immersed in Maureen’s world and words was the comfort of being in her company again. It felt like we were back on my screened-in porch in Kentucky, laughing one minute, crying the next, looking out at a garden with so many wild things growing.

-Barbara Leary

Photo by Adam Anderson on Unsplash