Six Weeks is a heartfelt memoir of caring for your dying sister Nancy, that explores family history, faith, loss, and the lasting impact of choices across generations. What inspired you to share your story with readers?

I didn’t initially set out to write a book about death. I wanted to tell the story of my sister’s life and our relationship, which happened to culminate in six extraordinary weeks.

Nancy and I shared a lifetime of experiences, some wonderful, some difficult, and often quite funny. When she became terminally ill, I found myself responsible for helping her navigate the final chapter of her life. Much of that responsibility involved ordinary things: paperwork, medical decisions, conversations, and simply showing up when I was needed.

Those six weeks became a lens through which I could examine the decades that preceded them. Decisions made years earlier suddenly acquired new meaning.

But there was another reason for writing the book: the quiet erasure of people and the lives they lived. Grace is often quiet. So is the labor of caring for others. Neither announces itself, and both risk disappearing from memory when the people who witnessed them are gone.

I believe our actions speak, sometimes more profoundly than our words. The ordinary things we do for one another, the responsibilities we accept, and the promises we keep tell a story of their own. I wanted those actions to be heard, and the people behind them to be remembered.

Ultimately, I wrote Six Weeks because Nancy was much more than her illness. I wanted readers to know the person I knew, and perhaps recognize something of their own relationships in ours.

How did you balance protecting Nancy’s privacy with telling an honest and complete story?

I don’t believe any memoir can tell a complete story. Memory is selective, perspective is necessarily limited, and a writer must decide what belongs on the page.

My guiding principle was to include only the people, events, and actions relevant to Nancy’s life or our shared journey. The purpose was never to expose others, but to show how circumstances, relationships, and choices shaped the story we were living.

I believe there is dignity in telling the truth about circumstances as they were, without embellishment or unnecessary judgment. That meant including difficult moments when they were essential to understanding our journey, while leaving aside details that served no meaningful purpose.

I tried to let events, conversations, and decisions speak for themselves rather than manufacture emotion or assign blame. Nancy was funny, intelligent, opinionated, and fully capable of speaking for herself. Preserving those qualities mattered as much as recounting the difficult circumstances surrounding her illness.

Honesty did not require revealing everything. It required including what was necessary to understand how we arrived at those final six weeks and the decisions we faced together.

For me, protecting Nancy’s dignity meant allowing her to remain fully human, while telling the truth about the journey that shaped us both.

What was the most difficult part of revisiting memories while writing the book?

I believe we are the sum of decisions made by us, for us, and sometimes upon us by generations before our own.

The hardest part of writing Six Weeks wasn’t revisiting individual memories, painful as some were. It was understanding and illustrating how those experiences were connected, how one decision influenced another, and how their accumulated consequences shaped the people Nancy and I became.

The book moves between Nancy’s final six weeks and events spanning decades. What initially appear to be separate experiences gradually reveal their connections. Circumstances that once seemed unfair or incomprehensible become part of a larger picture, one that helps explain the abilities, perspectives, and sometimes the limitations we carry into adulthood.

For Nancy and me, difficult experiences had forged skills that would later become essential. When her final illness confronted us with decisions neither of us wanted to face, those abilities helped us navigate the practical responsibilities of care while finding opportunities for reconciliation.

I wanted readers to recognize something similar in their own lives. Understanding how experiences accumulate, and how they shape the choices available to us, can reveal possibilities that may not have been apparent before.

Understanding and forgiveness go hand in hand. Forgiving does not require forgetting. Sometimes remembering clearly, and choosing a different response, is precisely what allows us to repair old fractures and forge new paths.

For me, that is how even painful memories can ultimately be understood with grace.

If Nancy could read the finished book, what do you think she would say to you about it?

I think Nancy would be pleased, because the book represents something she wished for me: the opportunity to rediscover a creative life I had set aside.

During her final six weeks, we spent considerable time reflecting on our lives, the trials and tribulations we had experienced, and the humor that had so often helped us through them. Nancy knew I had placed much of my creative life, including writing, on hold to pursue a business career and assume responsibilities that allowed me to help others in more practical ways.

She wanted something for me.

Nancy had written herself and dreamed of becoming a writer, but life never afforded her the opportunity to fully pursue that ambition. We had been forged in much the same foundry, shaped by many of the same experiences, and she recognized in me a creative passion that had remained largely unexplored.

She also wanted our lives and experiences to have meaning beyond the two of us. She believed the lessons we had learned through difficult choices, reconciliation, and grace might offer understanding and inspiration to others.

In her final letter to me, Nancy encouraged me to find peace and pursue new paths. Looking back, I see that wish as one of her final gifts. After years of practical responsibilities, she wanted me to reclaim something of myself.

Writing Six Weeks became a way to honor both wishes. Nancy’s life and our shared journey could be preserved, while the experiences that shaped us might help others better understand their own. At the same time, writing opened a door to the creative world I had deferred for so many years.

In that sense, the book reconciles much of our journey. It preserves Nancy’s story, offers the possibility of grace and inspiration to others, and allows me to explore a creative life that she understood and encouraged.

If Nancy could read the finished book, I think she would be pleased that her story continues to be told—and that I finally opened the door she wanted me to walk through.

And, of course, as my big sister, she would insist on having the last word.

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