WORK IN PROGRESS

 

The Sweetest Life:
A Story of Love, Betrayal & Transformation

Therese Wolfe

​

Preface

​

The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.

                                                                                                                          ~James Baldwin

​

 

What do you do when the truth of your life changes? When you are writing a memoir and the truth of the present changes the truth of the past? Or does it? You begin to tell another truth—the truth of the present as your truth, as only you know it. It's the only thing to do. To be brave enough to keep telling the truth even when the truth changes midlife, mid-sentence, mid-moment. And it's frightening because so much has already been written, has already happened in order for you to write those sentences—is happening to rewrite those sentences. So you begin to write and rewrite the truth. Trembling, you rewrite old sentences or cut them out altogether and begin new ones. You rearrange the story, find new words, renew courage, if it had been there at all. And it had been there. It counted. The past counted. Not with numbers but with heartbeats. Now courage must be summoned again. Be brave. Be wise. Be the sentence itself. Without compromise. Without excuse. With trust. With the light turned on brightly. Exposed. Raw. Tell the new story. Hold on to the old with tender regard for what was. What was not. Pay attention. Listen. Tell the truth as you know it. Tell the mystery as you must, as you can, as you will. Without hesitation. With love. With tenderness. Without compromise. The story: Love and Illness. And not in that order. Illness and Love. Not in that order, either. It happened all at once, really. The diagnosis, the lover, coexistent together—forever. Almost forever. Almost. The illness—no cure; the love breaking and healing. And then. And then you wrote and wrote and wrote.

 

This is your story, your whole broken story.

​

​