May 14: The Long and Complicated Origin Story of Following Infinity

It was the fall of 2002. The school year was only weeks old when my family got word that my younger sister, Erin, had been diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer. The two years we had between her diagnosis and death was the most painful time of my life, but had also been filled with extraordinary love and beauty. During that time, I decided I was going to chronicle all that was happening. I don’t remember if I had planned to turn what I was working on into a memoir someday, but eventually I did. I called it TWO YEARS TO SAY GOODBYE. I was proud of what I came up with, but as with any piece of writing I had done much earlier in life (this was my mid-thirties, and I’m now a week away from turning fifty-two), it’s difficult to look at without picking apart how poorly written and self-indulgent it feels. Because of that, it’s probably never going to see the light of day. 

Around the same time, I had the idea rattling around that I also wanted to write a fictional counterpart to that real-life story. Since I was focused on writing for a middle grade audience, I thought about writing from the perspective of a character about the age of my nephews, all of whom were pre-teens or little boys when Erin died. The problem was finding a story to tell. 

Then I noticed this picture hanging up in my house. And I really thought about it.

From what I can tell, it’s a photograph. I don’t think it’s any special work of art; in fact, I once saw a copy of it stashed in a rack with other poster art at Bed, Bath, and Beyond. The picture had been the last Christmas gift Erin would ever give me. She included a note about how that scene had been her happy place, her point of focus when everything had become too much for her to deal with, and that she couldn’t imagine a more peaceful spot anywhere in the world. She found a copy of it and wanted me to have it. I referenced the picture and what it meant to her when I wrote her eulogy. It’s still hanging in my living room. I doubt most of the people who ever come to my house understand its true significance.

The thought came to me that if Erin had been given the chance to visit any spot in the world before beginning whatever journey she had ahead of her on the way to eternity, she definitely would have stopped by that lake and sat on that dock to take in the peace and quiet, just for a moment. It made perfect sense to me. 

From there, the story began to grow. 

Originally it was about a song. My main character, a boy of twelve years or so, kept hearing the same song pop up all the time. It was a favorite song of his recently deceased aunt and it referenced some city out in California. The boy was haunted by this until his grandfather agreed to take him out to that location on his motorcycle to see if they could find anything. A kid that age who lost his aunt, with a motorcycle-riding grandfather… the characterization and the situation were both too close. 

I tweaked things. Same main character, same age, but this time he had lost a much older cousin, college-aged, who had been something of a mentor to him. There was some place in Florida they had visited with their families years earlier, and a particular spot they’d seen that had led to the two of them having a significant moment of some kind. Things came together with the girlfriend of the cousin agreeing to bring our main character on a trip to visit this place, so he could reach some sense of closure.

Again, it didn’t work. I had taken four or five runs at trying to draft this, and it never found any traction. I put the idea in the story vault to maybe revisit again someday. It stayed there for years. 

Back in real life, there was a year I had a girl in my class, Kiana, who had a younger brother named Kyle who was very sick. He was only a first grader and had already gone through his own cancer battle. Everything about losing Erin was still very raw for me, and I felt a draw to this little guy. I would joke with him when I saw him in the hallways, and it didn’t take long before he started joking right back with me. Knowing him and knowing what he was going through led to me knowing his sister better, and from a perspective that I didn’t usually get to know my students. I became fairly close with both of them. 

Two years later, Kyle’s illness returned. He wasn’t able to be at school following some treatment he’d had, so arrangements were made for him to be tutored at home. I moved quickly to make sure I’d get the assignment.

I worked with him on and off for most of that school year, if I remember it right. I saw the good moments and the not so good ones, and I saw so much of Erin’s experience reflected in what he was going through. After school ended, I even had a day or two when I'd go over just to visit. We’d hang out in the basement and play video games. He’d apologize repeatedly for being so much better at them than I was. 

The last day of his life turned out to be only days on the calendar away from the last day of Erin’s. It was hard to ignore the parallels, and made the grief that came with losing her fresh again. The story I’d shelved years earlier crossed my mind, and it hit me: I had been trying to tell it wrong the whole time. I was trying to filter my grief through a character that was too similar to my nephews, so everything I tried to write was too close to our story. I had to take myself out of it if I was ever going to be able to create a fully-realized character. It was still my story, but it couldn’t be about me at all.

I saw that all along, the character never should have even been a boy. The only way I could build a character that wouldn’t have any trace of me would be to write about a young girl. And instead of making it an aunt or an uncle or a cousin, writing a girl would allow me to write about losing a sibling, and to be honest about the pain that came with that. I thought about Kiana and Kyle, and decided to make the lost sibling a younger brother, to mirror my losing a younger sister. The characters wouldn’t based on the two of them — I knew them fairly well for students, but not at the personal level where I could have done that even if I’d wanted to — but I did give my characters, Molly and Michael, names that started with the same letter, as a tiny tribute to the two of them and what they’d gone through.

Weeks after this realization, National Novel Writing Month started. I wrote the first draft of 54,000 words in a little over three weeks. I did a couple editing passes and thought it was perfect and ready for an agent. My query letter got some notice from a handful of agents, and even a full request, which was a turning point: It became the moment that convinced me I should keep writing when I was ready to give it up altogether. That agent passed though, and nothing happened to the manuscript for a long time, other than being passed around between family and friends. A few years later, a cousin told me about a contest that eventually led to me working with my agent, Carrie. When she loved everything about my story that I wanted people to love, I knew she was the right one. Then she had me rewrite most of it and basically add an entire second act that hadn’t been there, which it turned out to desperately need. Carrie has a frustrating habit of usually being right. 

So there it is. If you’ve read the manuscript and you’re one of the people hoping along with us to see it published someday, now you know where it came from (and that you can thank Carrie for most of part two even existing).

Since today, May 14th, is Erin’s birthday, I thought more people should know how all of this came together. Her biggest fear about dying was being forgotten. If (WHEN!) this manuscript becomes a book and sees the light of day, I hope that even if readers never know Erin as anyone other than maybe a name in the dedication, they’ll still somehow carry a part of who she was with them.