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Hopefully Ever After
In The Widow Chose Red?, you share the highs and lows of your marriage and professional life, your unshakable faith, and your husband’s heartbreaking journey with ALS. Why was this an important book for you to write?
It was important to write this book for a few reasons: To heighten the awareness of ALS, which is still considered a rare disease. Too many people still don’t know about it. Proceeds from the book are benefiting the LiveLikeLou Foundation.
To have a written record of my life with John as something tangible for my boys to refer to.
To provide inspiration for others who may find themselves facing unimaginable circumstances and give them some support, insights, and strategies for dealing with those curveballs life throws at us. To remind people that we, as believers, we have all been gifted with a supernatural superpower in the form of the Holy Spirit, which is there to comfort and fortify us when we can’t go on..
I appreciated the candid nature with which you told your story. What was the hardest thing for you to write about?
The hardest parts to write about were the day we got the diagnosis, the Christmas we told his family, the day we told our boys, and the day John died. Even though it has been 14 years since John died, the mind is magical and mystical in how it can take us back to that moment in time, complete with emotion and physical presence. It’s never a fun process to go back to those moments of pain, suffering, sorrow and loss, and that is why sometimes, it is best to give yourself some time to process.
What advice would you give someone who is considering sharing their own memoir with readers?
Go for it! It’s your story, and someone will benefit from your sharing it. Get clear on your message. That being said, it is a process that can be lonely, confusing, and tiring, so get some support.
There are so many tech tools available (and I’m not talking AI), like transcription, voice recording, etc, that will make the process of getting it on paper so much easier. If you need to interview someone else to get a perspective…write up a list of questions and submit ahead of your conversation…give yourself a goal for writing…a number of words a day…a chapter a month…published by this date. Otherwise, it can go on forever, and don’t discount the editing process…it’s HUGE!!
What is one thing you hope readers take away from your experience?
Even when your “happily ever after” doesn’t go the way you wanted…you can have a “hopefully ever after” that is beyond your imagination.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website | Amazon
“She stood at his service wearing red. Not in defiance, not in denial – but in love. Because grief is not just sorrow; it is the bold echo of a love that never fades. And red is not just a color – it is the flame of the Holy Spirit and the fire that refuses to be extinguished.”
When Rachel Kerr Schneider lost her husband, the world expected her to mourn in black – to withdraw, to disappear into sorrow. But she made a different choice. She wore red. Not because she wasn’t grieving, but because love – real love – is too vibrant, too deep, too enduring to be cloaked in darkness. And because red, the color of fire, is the color of the Holy Spirit – the every-present force that carried her through the valley of grief and into a future she never imagined.
This is not just a memoir about loss – it is a story of resilience, faith, and the bold, sometimes unexpected ways we learn to live again. For anyone who has ever faced heartbreak and wondered if joy was still possible, The Widow Chose Red is a testament to the truth that even in sorrow, life still shines – and the Spirit still burns.
LITERARY TITAN 