I’m participating in a 31-day blogging challenge called reverb10, responding to writing prompts that are designed to elicit reflections on 2010, and hopes for 2011. You can find out more about it here.

Today’s Prompt: Make. What was the last thing you made? What materials did you use? Is there something you want to make, but you need to clear some time for it?

This year I made a little 126-page book, Be the Noodle: 50 Ways to Be a Courageous, Compassionate, Crazy-Good Caregiver, with stories and lessons on helping someone you love die.  I used the emails and blog posts I use to write at night while living with my mother during the last three months of her life. I use to write these to keep my family updated on my mother’s health.  Writing also helped me stay sane and calm.

I love the book cover, designed by the brilliant and generous Stress Limit Design up in Montreal.

What I am most grateful for are the emails from readers who have found comfort, courage and peace from connecting with another family’s story.

My favorite emails were from  a family down South. I first heard from the  college student whose father was dying, who read the book and gave it to her mother. Then I heard the mother’s story a few months later.

The young woman wrote:

“I read “Be the Noodle” and immediately started to feel better. It’s just such a unique book, because it is the only one I’ve come across that feels REAL It isn’t preachy or full of cheesy metaphors comparing tears to oceans or grief to stormy skies. It’s perfect. It actually is SO CLOSE to my mother’s care-giving experience that its creepy. Thank you so much for at least temporarily allowing me to get a little of my peace of mind back. I don’t doubt that ill have another wallowing slump, and another, and then another, and then I’ll be fine, and then I’ll wallow again, etc. but for today, I feel better.”

Then this email came from the young woman’s mother who told me the book helped her make her daughter part of the final weeks with  her father.

“Thank you for your book, it has been a wonderful blessing. I had no intention of sharing with my daughter or her brother those last 15 days, when my husband’s dying process had begun. My husband and I did not want those memories to be our children’s last memories of their father.

“But when my daughter read the book and told me about it, it allowed me to share with her the most agonizing, poignant, intimate, and life-changing experience of my life. Thanks to the book I could share that most intimate experience.

“I have been invited to the Oncology Dept. of our local hospital’s Patient Advocate Council’s next meeting. I plan to attend and hopefully be of some help to families as they ride the roller coaster and begin their journeys as caregivers. I plan to buy many copies of “Be the Noodle” and try to ‘pay it forward’ just as your family as done.

“Thank you for helping me remember my husband’s final days as his caregiver not as agony and heartbreak, but as “the most courageous, inspiring and rewarding job that I never wanted.”

Unlike my professional writing where I write from my head. I wrote this book from my heart. It’s the thing I’m most proud of having made in 2010.

PS:  The Noodle is a metaphor for those styrafoam swimming noodles; we caregivers were my mother’s noodle that she had to hang onto, even though as a swimmer she hated swimming noodles.

PPS: more stories from readers can be found here.