How to update a book when your father is dying
In August 2022, my father fell in a gas station parking lot in Michigan. It wasn’t uncommon for him to fall, but he was too proud to use a cane. This time, it took three men to help him up and get him into my mom’s Equinox. She drove him to the Emergency Room in Flint. Turns out that he had fractured his pelvis.
My dad had his first catastrophic heart attack in 1992. Thirty years of heart disease had whittled him away. He was too fragile for surgery to repair the broken bone. He remained confined to a hospital bed for nine weeks while they waited for the bone to heal on its own.
I was in the midst of finishing Death’s Garden Revisited. The books came from the printer in October. I packed the copies for the Kickstarter supporters and got on a plane as soon as he came home from the hospital.
At the end of November, I got an email from one of the editors at Black Dog & Leventhal, which had published 199 Cemeteries to See Before You Die in 2017. She said, “We have been discussing updating some books and 199 Cemeteries to See Before You Die is on that list. It seems to us that cemetery tourism keeps getting more and more popular.”
It’s a moment a writer dreams of: when your book has made the publisher so happy that they not only want to keep it in print, they want to give you a chance to expand it. I had to be honest with them, though: I knew that bad falls often began the cascade of failures that kill most elderly people. My dad didn’t want live-in help. He didn’t want help of any kind. I’m an only child, so I had to find a way to help my mom care for him.
The publisher understood that my father wasn’t well and that I was traveling back and forth to Michigan. They were thinking of a publication date in August 2024, which — in December 2022 — seemed very far away. We signed a contract.
Toward the end of January 2023, I started the conversation about what they wanted me to add. I wanted to fill in the American states I’d missed in the first volume. The editor batted the question back to me: what had readers felt was missing from the first book? Could I add more international cemeteries, more tourist destinations?
The day after I got her email, Dad entered the hospital for the last time. He might have had a stroke. His kidneys were failing. Mom and I refused surgery to prepare him for dialysis. The hospital released him to a nursing home. I was finally able to talk my mom into setting up hospice care.
Dad seemed somewhat stable then, so I went back to California and researched like a crazy person. Two weeks later, I submitted my list of new cemeteries to write about.
The following week, the hospice nurse called to tell me it was time to come back. Dad died before I got off the plane.
March passed in a blur of planning the funeral and buying a headstone, trying to sort out my parents’ taxes, making sure the farm could continue to run and someone would harvest the crops when the time came. I tried to line up people to spy on my mom and let me know if she needed anything. The deadline to turn in the new cemetery entries was the end of April, so I went back to California again and put my head down over my research.
Mom had a stroke on April 19. I printed out everything I could, xeroxed pages from my cemetery library, and flew back to Michigan. While Mom was hospitalized, I held myself to drafting a new cemetery piece or two each day. The work needed to be done and I was learning so much. To be honest, I found it a relief to have something to escape to.
I took my mom out for lunch and we celebrated my dad’s birthday for the first time without him.
When Mom was released from the hospital, it was with the understanding that I would find assisted living for her. She could feed herself and dress, but something had happened to the language part of her brain and she couldn’t communicate. The hospital called it “word salad.” It would have been fascinating if it hadn’t been so terrifying.
I packed up my childhood home, moved Mom into a retirement community where the nurses would come three times a day to make sure she took her meds, and rushed back to California to finish writing about the new 23 cemeteries. I turned them in a month after my deadline — yay, me! — and began updating the text of the original 199 cemeteries.
The first six months of 2023 were among the most challenging and exhausting of my life. My editor Lisa Tenaglia was always patient and kind. I think both of us were relieved when I turned in the updates and they could begin the design.
We went through several rounds of proofreading and tweaking, but everything was really, most sincerely done in December. In January 2024, I saw the new cover. I felt something unhitch in my chest. This book was going to be a thing of beauty. I was immensely proud of what I had been able to accomplish, despite everything.
Despite everything, 222 Cemeteries to See Before You Die will be out as contracted next week! Click the link to be taken to the universal sales page. Hachette and Amazon are having a sale.
Coming August 27, 2024:
