“Passion and purpose go hand in hand. When you discover your purpose, you will normally find it’s something you’re tremendously passionate about.”~Steve Pavlina, Blogger and Author

 My late husband, Bob, gave me a great gift. As he lay in his hospital bed back in 2000, having just been diagnosed with cancer, he asked my son and I to go buy him a tape recorder. We were glad to escape the hospital with all of its suffering. In a messy old store, we found a brand new Sony recorder and gave it to Bob when we got back to his room.

He could barely speak; we had to make him stop every 15 minutes to rest. He was telling “our story.” Telling how we met in fourth grade, met up again in high school, got engaged while he was at Georgia Tech. “I had gotten on my knees and prayed God to let me marry this woman,” he said.

In between speaking, the three of us would sit silently, buried under a mound of brand-new grief, tears slipping down each face. We put a “No Visitors sign” on the door. I told the nurse what was going on and she was moved. Who wouldn’t be? I had not planned to spend the summer in quite this way.  But Bob had been ill for over a year, the undiagnosed cancer breaking  his ribs and making the pounds melt away from his once-muscled body.

Now he was speaking again. “I want you to find your passion before I die,” he said. I said nothing, just waited for him to go on. I don’t even remember what he said next. He just kept talking about our lives together. He had some plan about hooking up our two home computers to do research on multiple myeloma. Eventually he finished the recording. I am still here typing, doing what he asked me to do before he died.

He did die, right before Christmas of 2005. During his illness I began my website to support him. I quickly knew I was called to write and that I would never stop. Two years ago I published Life With A Hole In It: That’s How The Light Gets In. It has touched the hearts of many people because Bob knew something that I didn’t know. That I needed a reason to go on living after he died.

The title of the book arose from an email in which I wrote something about widowhood. “It’s like living life with a hole in it,” I typed. And it is. But the subtitle is “That’s How The Light Gets In.” Bob must have known that.

I have now written countless words on my website, all arising from the fountain of love that is never ending. I used to think that I would do something bigger than just being at home behind the iMac 7 days a week writing. But actually, that is a very big kind of love, a very big kind of calling. I ask no more of life than to serve this passion I was asked to find by someone who loved me more than life itself.

If you want to know what he would say about what I just wrote, he probably would have just smiled. Sometimes that is the most powerful thing on earth.

If you would like to read more, please order Life With A Hole In It. That can be done from this site by clicking here. Or if you are so moved, donate a small amount to keep the site up and running.

Come back soon….